What is Mystery Shopping

Mystery Shopping is a valuable research tool that allows companies to measure the quality of their service from their customers perpective. Mystery Shoppers act as "real customers", evaluating the store, interacting with the staff and completing an on-line report to record their experience. Trained mystery shoppers are sent into a restaurant, a hotel, a supermarket, or any type of retail store to evaluate their experience as a paying customer.

Mystery shopping is not a spying mechanism, but an effective tool that allows managers to recognise weaknesses/strengths, take appropriate action, acknowledge or reward consistent performance, and improve the quality and performance of goods and services. Mystery shopping can be used as an effective method to instill positive changes in staff behaviours. Changes in staff behaviour can be encouraged and maintained in the long term when mystery shopping programmes are used in conjunction with incentive programmes.