The starting point for most Mystery Shopping projects are retailers and shop owners who have an expectation on how their staff should behave in certain situations, how products should be presented on a shelf or what other standards should be met during the purchasing process. Mystery Shopping evaluates to what degree these concepts actually work in practice, by sending test buyers to the shops and allowing them to report their experiences in a standardised way.
One typical case in Mystery Shopping studies is evaluating the staff on how they advise their customers and their service mindedness. Most often, such an evaluation will follow a pre-defined test scenario and test buyers have to be familiarised with the role they are supposed to adopt for the test (e.g. making a complaint or seeking advice). In some cases, test buyers can be selected because they are actually planning to make use of the service, which will lead to a much more natural scenario (i.e. an advice on the credit line, where an established customer relationship with the financial institution is provided).
Another case in Mystery Shopping are holistic compliance checks that include all aspects of the customer experience in a shop, e.g. the availability of certain products, the presentation of products on the shelf, prices, the atmosphere and possibly also the availability and service mindedness of staff, if required.
Traditionally, Mystery Shopping is performed with test buyers who are sent to a local store. However, it’s worth mentioning that remote tests are becoming increasingly important, e.g. Mystery Calls or Mystery Emails to evaluate the service level of support teams or Online Mystery Shopping to assess delivery times of online shops (especially if these depend on third party suppliers) and how returns are processed.
It’s against this background that you will probably not be surprised to hear that every Mystery Shopping project can have very unique requirements and challenges. We’ll cover the most important points to consider in the following text.
The first challenge of Mystery Shopping projects is actually not so much about the method, but about if and how such projects are announced in the business units being tested. Mystery Shopping should remain “a mystery” for those being tested, – hence the name. Sales staff, support teams or shop owners should not be able to distinguish whether the actual customer is a real customer or merely a test buyer evaluating the experience.
The problem is that employees will usually start looking out for test buyers and try to reveal them, as soon as rumours about test purchases start spreading. This is particularly the case, when these tests are officially announced by the management. Unfortunately in turn, this may have an impact on the validity of such studies, as some employees may behave differently than usual. However, if managers feel that test purchases need to be announced, they should ideally only use a very rough time frame (e.g. next quarter).
It should be noted that, at least in some cases, test buyers must reveal their identity directly after the purchase, especially if articles have been embezzled during the checkout for the purpose of the test. This poses an additional challenge and should be reflected when planning a Mystery Shopping project. You may either choose very short field times to finish your tests before rumours have fully spread, or you go with an ongoing study format to insinuate that anyone could be tested anytime.
Whatever your setup is, test buyers need to be recruited carefully and receive a thorough training in advance to perform the tests without arousing the staff’s attention. This is actually the biggest challenge in Mystery Shopping projects.