Mystery shopping is a quite powerful quality assurance tool. It helps a company get a true and straightforward feedback. Mystery shoppers are sent by companies to judge the level of their quality. A mystery shopper poses as a normal customer to find out how the regular customers are treated by the company.

Customer is the king. Companies cant afford to disappoint them. Therefore, most of the mystery shopping assignments are meant to rate the customer service levels of companies. There are several ways through which a secret shopper decides how customer friendly a company is.

They may go to a shop to return back the merchandise they’ve bought a few days back. This will help to know how the company deals with customers who come to them for exchanging the merchandise.
They may ask a salesman to help him find the right outfit for an occasion. This will help to know how helpful the sales staff is and if it has good knowledge about latest trends.

Nowadays, customers want much more. People do’nt just rate a shop based on the quality of products they sell but a lot of other things which includes its interior, lighting, and music. A mystery shopper thoroughly checks the facilities. He checks several things, such as the type of music played by the shop, whether the music is too loud, how clean the toilets are, and if the shop is properly lit. All feedback received from the mystery shopper is used by the company in its quality assurance pursuit.

Its clear that mystery shopping is quite useful to the service industry in quality assurance. Many important management decisions are made based on the observations of such assignments.