Mystery shopping has been a staple part of the customer experience armoury for a long time. Done well, it’s ideal for gathering detailed information about a particular aspect of your shop or restaurant. Armed with a list of questions, mystery shoppers collect feedback that other customers simply don’t volunteer.
However, there lies the rub. These shoppers are primed to look for things that the average shopper or diner might not look for. It creates a blind spot as you could be asking for information about an aspect of your store that’s important to you, but not important for the majority of customers.
And with that comes another challenge: what does the average customer look like for your business? If you’re a purveyor of fine foods, you’ll have a certain profile in mind. How well the mystery shopper matches the profile is often an unknown. This brings into question the validity of the feedback and in particular, whether they are representative of your customer. Can you trust the comment the food was expensive if the person providing the feedback is more likely to be buying quorn than quail?
The other shortcoming is that mystery shops are a ‘dipstick’ test rather than a barometer test that’s indicative of what’s really going on under the bonnet. Grocery shopping on a Tuesday morning when your shopper visits might always be perfect – the store tidy, well stocked and queue times negligible. However, what’s the reality of a Friday evening when people are picking up a last minute dinner and wine on their way home from work?
When you start to evaluate the pros and the cons of mystery shopping a number of questions arise. Firstly, how can we get to a position where the feedback we gather is truly representative of our business? And secondly, how does the information we gather get used to make real operational change to process and performance that has a long-lasting positive effect?
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