Why Mindshare? - Glossary

 

Mystery Shopper:

An expensive and incomplete way of measuring service in retail shopping environments. Performed by third-party individuals who are pretending to be customers. Mystery Shoppers are people who do contract work with a mystery shopping company for the company they're "mystery shopping." It is estimated that about 2.5 million people in the US are contract "Mystery Shoppers." Mystery Shoppers often do work for companies in retail stores, restaurants, real estate agencies, banks, hotels, and shops of all sorts. Mystery shoppers are asked to report on how clean a business is, how quickly they are greeted, they rate Customer Service, and the quality of service or products.

There is a lot of criticism about the effectiveness of Mystery Shopping as a viable method of obtaining reliable information. First, Mystery Shoppers are not your Real Customers. They may never have heard about your company, they aren't interested in your services or products, and they are only coming into your business to fulfill an assignment. Secondly, Mystery Shoppers go into your business looking for things to report on, and aren't likely going to be impressed with your products or services, since they don't need them anyway. Another complaint about mystery shopping is that you don't get the survey results for weeks or even months after the supposed customer came into your store. Obviously, if there is a serious problem, you won't find out about it until it's almost too late to do anything to correct it.

Perhaps the biggest complaint about collecting feedback via mystery shoppers is that it is so expensive: a single survey may cost you $80 or up. When compared to Automated Surveys, that quickly and efficiently obtain real information from your real customers for pennies, it's easy to see why Mindshare Technologies has become the top choice in customer feedback and marketing research.