A Rudderless Ship: The Wrong Way to Mystery Shop

Da Vinci said: “He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” Building a ship without a rudder leaves you at the mercy of the seas, you never know where you may land, or if you will land at all.

There are lessons to learn here when conducting research and measurement projects. Without clear goals, planning and direction, your results may not find your intended port.

Over my years in the customer service measurement industry, I have often heard comments and feedback along the lines of: “I’m not getting what I want from mystery shops”, “I can’t use the data for anything” and even “the results are only telling me what I already know”.

My question is, are you using mystery shopping correctly?

Mystery shopping by design was created in a very formulaic manner. Most programs, at their core, are practically carbon copies of each other. Even across different industries, it is not uncommon to find that 90% of questions being asked are almost identical in every survey.

Some agencies will guide you to a customised survey that best suits your business, however in many instances – and often not entirely with them to blame – you will often find it just so happens to look like a slightly altered version of every other client on their books.

For example, you’ve likely heard something like: “We can see greeting is important to your business, so we’ll put that time measurement to 30 seconds instead of 60 seconds and we’ll increase the points to 2.” This isn’t necessarily because they are trying to pull the wool over your eyes – it’s simply because the importance of the greeting – or lack thereof – is a universal truth in customer management.

What it isn’t

To view mystery shopping properly, it needs to be thought of as a tool within a toolkit, a swiss army knife that can be used in a variety of ways depending on the goals of your business. There are many things that mystery shops can be, however, let’s start off with what mystery shopping is not.

1. Mystery shopping is not a measure of customer satisfaction.
   Sending a shopper in with set criteria and predefined questions to answer means they are not legitimate and therefore can’t properly determine whether they are satisfied by an experience without basing it off the measures in the survey.
   The shopper may fit the profile – and may even actually be a customer of your business depending on the demographics you’ve applied – but at the time of the assignment, they are on the job and thinking objectively.
2. Mystery shopping is not an avenue for subjective measurement.
   Shoppers are the closest thing you can get to the genuine article, but they aren’t actually customers. Can someone provide true feedback on their feelings of a purchasing experience of a product that they have no real interest in, no need for or that they were instructed and incentivised to browse or buy?
   Instead, utilise mystery shopping to measure the steps that staff should follow in order to achieve success based on your strategies, e.g. following the sales process for best chance at closing a deal, or the customer journey process to best achieve positive customer satisfaction.
3. Mystery Shopping is not a replacement for Voice of the Customer measurement or other forms of direct customer feedback.
   Nor, for that matter, is Voice of the Customer (VoC) a replacement for mystery shopping. VoC programs capture client satisfaction and emotional reactions to experiences and brands as compared to the process-driven objective measurement.
   While these forms of research are not interchangeable, they do complement each other perfectly, e.g. use VoC and feedback programs to measure what your customers want, develop a strategy, and then use mystery shopping to measure the success of the implementation of the strategy at the frontline.
4. Mystery shopping is not a tool to spy on staff for disciplinary reasons.
   Okay – some businesses use it this way, but they really shouldn’t. “You attract more bees with honey than vinegar”, and this is true of the best way to utilise a mystery shop program. Using a program to train, recognise and reward staff historically drives greater improvement on the frontline than the negative culture that can be created from a hanging guillotine.

Mystery shopping at its simplest is a covert assessment of a customer service encounter or a location. Which part of the encounter it assesses, however, can be completely malleable to your businesses needs and goals.

• Need to make sure the store put the poster up? Send in a shopper to check.
• Can a shopper check if staff recommend your product over a competitor? Absolutely.
• Can the shopper measure if the staff member followed the proper sales steps? Definitely.
• Has feedback raised concerns of the state of restrooms in your business? Utilise ground staff to capture photo evidence.
• “Vision without action is a daydream, action without vision is a nightmare.” (Japanese proverb)

In the current age of customer experience measurement, data and information is key and businesses must use their data wisely, and manage budgets effectively. If previous CX research has shown that your customers have no desire to be greeted at the door, or that being greeted quickly has no impact on their experience, it would be fruitless to waste a valuable question measuring greeting time. If your customers don’t care about name badges or uniforms, then avoid those questions and concentrate on what matters to them.

Sure, in some instances these examples are important to a customer (e.g. being able to figure out who the staff member is for help), and when it’s important, by all means include it as a measurement, but if you strategically determine what is important to the customer, you can instead design a strategy and therefore a series of questions that will measure performance in areas that create a real impact on your business.

Knowing your goals and achieving them

With the correct survey planning and instructions, a mystery shopper can be used to make almost any objective assessment during their time on location – although remember, human brains can only hold so much information at once. With this in mind, you can set your goals of the information you need, and plan a set of questions and scenarios that will directly lead to data that meets those goals.

Similarly, determining the goals of your campaign can assist in determining what stores to visit and how frequently. If you are mystery shopping to drive staff sales performance through an incentive program, then visiting every store every month is perfect. But in the case of a supplier wanting to assess product knowledge across several chains selling your product you may only need a sample size of each brand. As a retail business, you may also choose to focus your money where it will have the most impact by targeting high volume stores where service is critical to brand value or to stores with low satisfaction ratings to improve performance.

Taking the time to properly design a program before it’s launch will not only ensure you’re investing your money wisely, but it will also ensure your mystery shopping program is being used correctly, and delivering evidence on the success of your strategies.

So, how do you mystery shop?