Introduction to Mystery Shoppers

Customer satisfaction research is designed to create a customer lens – looking through the eyes of the customer in order to understand their experiences at your store. Many companies employ a practical version of this known as "Mystery Shopping." Mystery shopping involves paying someone to shop at your store, and having them evaluate various components of your customer service process.

Most mystery shoppers are paid to evaluate service provided by employees around the store. For example, the shopper will wait in the frozen foods section of a grocery store, see how quickly they're serviced, see how knowledgeable the staff member is, and rate the employee that helped them. The mystery shopper logs their entire account of being in the store and uses whatever rating system the company provides.

Mystery shoppers can also be used as a tool to understanding the customer experience. For example, the mystery shopper can be asked how easy it was to find specific items, or if they noticed something was lacking about their experience. Mystery shoppers can also be trained to try any area of your business.

Even if you own a B2B company, you can have a mystery shopper call in as a prospective client and help them rate the efficacy of your sales staff, or you can have them receive training in how to use a product and see how they respond to both the product and the training. While retail is the most common place for mystery shopper services, the idea behind mystery shoppers (having an individual evaluate your customer service, store, and products) is a sound one – one that can easily complement other research techniques or possibly be used as a qualitative research tool amidst your quantitative ones.

In many ways, mystery shopping is as much about satisfaction as it is market research. You're not only able to evaluate the quality of your employees and their service, but you can also gain valuable insight into how the employee sees your company. Overall, mystery shopping is a tool that can be used by a variety of industries, and may benefit all types of businesses. It's not a perfect tool, as we'll explore in an upcoming article, but it does give you insight into your company for a low cost, and can help you learn more about where you need to improve or where your company is thriving.