How Mystery Shopping Has Evolved

Mystery Shopping•on October 20th, 2009•1 Comment

What are urban legends? Well, these are folks – stories or beliefs which are backed by adequate credible logics for which people are always keen to wonder whether or not an idea will come true. Well the store Shop N Check has an urban legend as well- many organizations might find this experience similar to theirs when they also ventured appointing a mystery shopping agency.

A couple of years back, a client intently consumed in a lecture on How mystery shopping programs can be integrated in a company’s manifesto to boost the internal development and increase the level of efficiency. While he was gathering insight on the many fold aspects of mystery shopping and was deciding to employ one as he himself had trouble most of the times keeping tabs on his retail business- he bumped into an intriguing issue. In that very lecture it was emphasized that the frontline employees be informed that they will be mystery shopped, and they should also be explained the rationale behind the questions of surveys as well as how the results will be interpreted. Now, at this point they lost the client- he was startled and confused. He raised the question- How does the very mystery of Mystery shopping exist when it has been foretold to the employees? And if the employees already know that they are going to be shopped-aren’t they going to score 100% when they shouldn’t?

What people fail to realize that is the scope of mystery shopping doesn’t end only at collecting data. The collected data has no value until or unless it has been interpreted with proper analysis. Even the analysis is of no use if the organization can’t come to any conclusion with all the hypotheses presented.

After many studies of mystery shopping and the patterns those occur after they have been adopted for the first time- the pros in the area have come up with a number of stages which all the companies have to go through regardless of the type or reason of mystery shopping. There is no scientific basis for such assumptions, however these are highly predictable. The differences in the stages occur due to the fact whether any organization have previously experienced mystery shopping sessions or not.

One thing that must be maintained in mystery shopping program is that it must be top-driven. Without the active participation of the top management there is no point in carrying out such programs- when the core objective of the program is to figure out the faults in the management.

Below are described the different stages of mystery shopping:

1. Denial:

This stage is most obvious with the companies adopting mystery shopping procedures for the first time. Most of these cases the management finds it difficult to rely on the results that have been obtained. They blame the days, the situations, the moments or any other or all the other surrounding factors for the unexpected turn of results- but they cannot believe the fact that there have been some faults in their systems, even though sometimes they have carried out extensive training sessions. A number of reasons feed into such criticisms of the denial stage:

* If there has been some bad prior experience with unskilled mystery shopping agencies.
* If the management is suspicious about the corporate programs.
* Poor knowledge of the implementation, analysis and utilization of the obtained result
* Tendency of blaming the result on the return of a day or the performance of one specific employee.

2. Acceptance:

It takes time for the clients to start seeing through the bad figures on the results and usually it takes multiple shopping experiences before they appear at the stage of acceptance. At the denial stage managers may wave out a result or question its validity blaming a bad day or a bad employee. But with time when concurrent shopping results come out with unsatisfactory results managers find it hard to disregard or cancel out.

Numbers of reasons give into hastening of acceptance-

* When the top as well as the mid-level management decide on the importance of the mystery shopping program and thus include it in the vital strategic system rather than regarding it as a punitive program.
* When the top and mid-level management signifies the objectives of the programs
* The frontline employees as well as the store managers when engage with the program interactively. Hence they can use a forum to discuss the outcomes and their possible remedies. Some mystery shopping organizations also provide after shopping feedback to individual employees.
* Last but not the least the quality promise of the program is crucial.

3. Primary Rewards:

This stage starts when there are strategies undertaken as well as implemented in order to attain better shopping scores in the next session. This is the most basic reinforcement that can be provided. While this plays as the initial focus- the focus is shifted as soon as the performance starts to improve. Hence the effect of incentives should be kept in mind as well. Later on the real benefits are accrued in form of:

* Heightened customer satisfactions
* Improved retention of the customers
* Stronger customer loyalty
* Increase in sales
* Increase in employee satisfaction and retention
* Customer service awards.

4. Cultural Indoctrination:

Now when the organization have started to rip the results of the mystery shopping programs and incorporated the rewarding systems- the final stage is to indoctrinate the process in the organizational culture, i.e. to regard mystery shopping systems as THE vital component of the management process and to link it with the strategic decisions. Hence onwards, mystery shopping is used for quality improvement and managing brand promises.

Source