In the retail business, every company wants to have customer service of the highest quality to be able to attract and keep customers over and above those of its competitors. As a result, it is incredibly important to have regular assessments in stores and individual locations to ensure that staff are pulling their weight and are embracing the company values as and when required. This is why mystery shopping is one of the most popular ways of assessing an individual store.
Mystery shopping is effectively the practice of an individual mystery shopper going into a store and posing as a regular customer for a set period of time in order to assess just how good the service in the store is. The identity of the mystery shopper is not known to the staff and so they cannot get preferential treatment that does not characterise the regular level of service available in the store. This is important because it is what separates mystery shopping from higher management assessments. If staff know that there is an area manager in the store then they will usually be on their best behaviour. As they never know when a mystery shopper will be coming into the store they have to be on their best behaviour all the time.
Mystery shopping is the best possible way to get an accurate assessment of just how the store is run and operates in the public eye. It gives an accurate but unbiased perception of just how customer friendly the business is, which ensures that all of the results that are ultimately reported are correct and can be used as a benchmark for improvement.
The whole idea behind mystery shopping is that a company can use the results to see exactly what areas of the customer service and business in general are lacking with a view to improving them. Mystery shoppers that have no attachment to the company at all can provide the detachment and constructive criticism that a company needs to be able to fully assess the business practices. As such, a company can formulate its own assessment structure and investigate the areas that it truly wants to improve. It could be core business values, customer service, prices, layout or anything else that could make the business stand out from its competitors. As such, mystery shopping is an invaluable tool.