Who needs mystery shoppers?
You do. If you sell anything to anyone, you would do yourself a world of good by enlisting mystery shoppers (sometimes called secret shoppers) into your customer insights mix. But I have a specific beef with the standard way mystery shopping works.
But, first, let’s talk about what it is v. what it should be.
What is mystery shopping?
According to the Mystery Shopping Providers Association (MSPA):
“Mystery shopping is a process in which pre-recruited and qualified consumers measure the extent to which a customer’s interactions with a business mirror the experiences the business intends.”
Sounds good. Typically, it is. Retailers, financial services organizations and healthcare practices have all enlisted mystery shoppers to help improve their customers’ experiences. These shoppers range from young adults to retired senior citizens. Some “shop” once a month as a side job, and others might shop almost every day. There is typically a fee paid to the shopper for this service – it’s normally transactionally based. The shopper gets paid for turning in the appropriate forms with the information collected from a shopping trip. For example, the form might have objective questions, like “Were you greeted upon arriving?” and some more subjective issues, like “how friendly was the staff?”
It’s not a bad way to find out if the in-store experience is living up to the expectations of the business.
What does mystery shopping tell you?
Using the objective feedback of yes/no to those straight-forward questions, real data can paint a compelling story. If the store manager expects the customers to be greeted every time they enter, the data of mystery shoppers who were only greeted 20% of the time shows that this expectation is not being fulfilled in the right way. It’s an easy and quick fix to improve the customer experience.
Mystery shoppers can also tell you in a more general sense what sort of larger issues might be lurking. If 100% of your mystery shoppers report that the display is unorganized, you know what to attack first.
What does mystery shopping NOT tell you?
The thing about mystery shopping which is hard to overcome is the same issue I have with certain usability testing methods and focus groups. It’s great to get some feedback, but it won’t give you the real feedback all of the time. Humans act differently when we are given incentives. (Tweet this!)
Is your customer experience examined in a vacuum?
By asking someone to track a specific process as they shop, you are impacting their behavior. Some feedback, like the examples I mentioned, will be absolutely valuable and immediately actionable. But the nuance of how we, as busy people who are just living our daily lives, interact with brands and products and services in the midst of having a rotten day, will be somewhat lost when the experience is examined in a vacuum. The nuance of how the cashier handles the busy woman with kids or the overly talkative lonely guy could be very different than when it’s a Mary Mystery Shopper following a linear process.
It’s also much harder to gather this type of feedback when it is a business-to-business organization. Mystery shopping a complex sales process is pretty challenging due to the high-level qualifications often required.
How should you gather this feedback?
Mystery shopping really can serve about anybody wanting to improve their customer experience. Any way you can gather insights into your customers needs and the real way they are treated is a good thing. But mystery shopping in its traditional, in-store form doesn’t go far enough. Our version of mystery shopping at 360Connext is really an attempt at understanding as much of the customer journey as we can.
Customer Experience Investigation™ is really about this idea of understanding the actual experience from the customer’s perspective. But your customer might be different than our team, so we use personas to guide us and try to find examples of these customers “in the wild” as much as we can. There’s a heavy observation focus on understanding customers, along with walking in the customer’s shoes as much as we’re able.
And it’s not just about shopping.
Shopping implies really only caring about the consideration and acquisition phases of the customer journey, and of course that’s only the beginning of the real relationship. Understanding what happens once customers become customers is really where insights can become insightful about loyalty and retention.
Have you observed your customers in key moments?
There are too many “moments of truth” to list in most customer experiences. Do you know what they are? Mystery shopping through the entire customer journey can give you some insights into what they are and which ones need attention. But it’s very, very, very difficult to mystery shop your own organization. If you are inside the organization, you will inevitably see the organizational dependencies differently than a customer would. But if you’re ready to consider examining your customer experience via outside mystery “shoppers,” get ready to consider both quick fixes and long-term solutions. There are often long lists of both to address.
Image credits: BAMCorp, JD Hancock and W10002 via Creative Commons
