When a client company comes on board with a company providing Mystery Shopping services, a survey model will be drawn up and agreed to which defines what information and improvement factors the client company wishes to measure as part of the mystery shopping process. These are then drawn up into survey instruments and assignments that are allocated to shoppers registered with the mystery shopping company in question.

Some of the common details and information points shoppers:

the date and time of the pre-visit phone call
the name of the store on each side of the store visited
number of employees in the store on entering
how long it takes before the mystery shopper is greeted
the name of the employee(s)
whether or not the greeting is friendly
the questions asked by the shopper to find a suitable product
the types of products shown
if or how the employee attempted to close the sale
whether the employee invited the shopper to come back to the store
cleanliness of store and store associates
speed of service
compliance with company standards relating to service, store appearance, and grooming/presentation
Shoppers are often given instructions or procedures to make the transaction atypical to make the test of the knowledge and service skills of the employees more stringent or specific to a particular service issue (known as scenarios). For instance, mystery shoppers at a restaurant may pretend they are lactose-intolerant, or a clothing store mystery shopper could inquire about gift-wrapping services. Not all mystery shopping scenarios include a purchase.

While gathering information, shoppers usually blend in to the store being evaluated as regular shoppers. They may sometimes be required to take photographs or measurements, return purchases, or count the number of products, seats, people during the visit. A timer or a stopwatch may be required. In some states, mystery shoppers must also be licensed as private investigators in order to perform some of the tasks.

From there, the shopper will then submit the data collected to the Mystery shopping company in question. The data is then reviewed and analyzed before quantitative and qualitative statistical [analysis] reports on the data are then returned to the client company that enables measurement against the previously defined criteria.

Would you like to see detailed analysis of your companies sales and service scores. Contact us now to arrange some mystery shopping evaluations in your units, by our team of mystery customers.

Mystery Customer Evaluation Team.