"Mystery Shopping is Obsolete" - Here's a few reasons why this is definitely not the case.

I recently saw a promo video that popped up on my LinkedIn Home Page about how mystery shopping is obsolete. Now, I know I am somewhat biased (!) but here is why I strongly believe mystery shopping is not, and will never be, obsolete.

Mystery Shopping is hugely versatile and can be used to gain insight into customer experience; staff performance; compliance monitoring and competitor intelligence.

The promo video was referring to mystery shopping in the context of solely assessing customer experience; I completely agree that mystery shopping alone is not going to be a good enough tool to be able to assess the full customer experience – mystery shopping is designed to be a purely objective tool to assess what happened throughout the experience. When trying to assess the customer experience, you will also need to talk to your actual customers. Mystery shoppers are not always genuine customers of the client and therefore each assessment form needs to be carefully thought through to decide whether opinion based questions should be included, and if they are, whether they should be scored.

The promo video sited that mystery shopping is simply a checklist that only creates robotic behaviours and destroys a colleague’s initiative. If this IS happening, it’s purely down to the design of the programme and not to do with mystery shopping itself.

In some cases this can actually be down to the Client’s own strict sales and service models or compliance procedures that don’t allow the colleagues to use their own service skills when speaking to their customers. For example, on almost every visit I’ve made personally to a high street fashion retailer over the last 6+ years I have been asked “Did you find everything you were looking for today?” when I’ve got to the till. This question is not relevant to me at all. I, like many other customers of this store, do not go in there looking for a specific item of clothing, we go in there purely to shop! Having said this, every single time I’ve been asked this question I have responded with “yes, thank you”.

The reason mystery shopping is so successful is that customers are rarely honest when answering questions like the above, and notoriously try to avoid any potential confrontation. People don’t voluntarily leave constructive feedback when they are unhappy with the service they have received. Instead, they tend to tell everyone else about their negative experience, which can be very damaging.

As mystery shopping allows companies to find out exactly what happened during the experience, they can then decide whether the service provided meets their company standards, or not. Once staff know mystery shopping is taking place, an increase in service levels is often noticed straight away as staff are ‘on guard’ for potential mystery shoppers. The feedback and actionable data mystery shopping provides can then be used for staff training and showing staff where improvements can be made. Running the mystery shopping regularly allows companies to track the improvements in service as well as ensure the standards do not slip – a periodic ongoing programme can quickly improve the overall business performance and increase sales, customer service levels and ensure ongoing compliance.

Once required standards are met, programmes should then be redesigned to allow for further improvement; if results are showing that all customers are now receiving an experience that meets their expectations, why not now try to exceed them?

Ironically, upon investigating the company behind this promo video, I can see that they do actually provide ‘customer experience evaluations’ by ‘secret shoppers’ to carry out ‘missions’ – which sounds a lot like mystery shopping to me!