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Mystery-Shopping.org.uk
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| Mystery Shopping Articles | Be a Mystery Shopper | Get Paid to Shop |
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Typical Mystery Shopping Assignments: No two mystery shopping assignments are ever the same, something you will soon learn for yourself. In fact, thousands of different tasks are involved in millions of different environments.
That said, however, most work involves visiting retail premises to check stock levels, cleanliness and hygiene, staff attitude and courtesy towards customers, customer service, and so on.
As a typical example, imagine Store A faces a big drop in profits one week and hears that Store B, just up the street, is having to employ new staff to cope with a 200 per cent increase in visitors. A first reaction might be that Store A’s customers have moved to Store B, for whatever reason.
Whether this is likely to be short term is anyone’s guess, but no business can afford to wait to find out. Immediate action has to be taken to learn why customers have stopped coming to Store A, and where they are going instead. Store B? Possibly, but no one knows for certain, yet!
And, if customers are moving over to Store B, is it coincidence, some short-term irresistible offer from Store B, something related to Store A which has alienated its customers, or is it the sign of a deliberate attempt by Store B to poach customers from Store A? If so, what is the problem, what is the big incentive? Is it something Store A can copy to win business back?
Or can Store A better Store B’s incentive and not only win back its own former customers, but perhaps a sizeable share of Store B’s customers, too? Can these questions be answered by the manager of Store A or his staff actually visiting Store B or by questioning customers leaving the premises? Probably not!
It’s a perfect scenario for employing mystery shoppers to check both stores, A and B, to determine which offers the best range of goods, whose staff are most helpful, who has the best pricing and incentives policy, and so on.
However, the example shows just one reason for employing mystery shoppers. In reality many more tasks are assigned to people who can act, convincingly, as everyday customers.
More Examples
- You might be asked to telephone a customer service hotline, posing as a customer with a problem to see how quickly your call is answered and how well staff respond to your needs.
- The manager of a high street supermarket might commission you to stand outside and count the number of customers leaving a competitor’s premises and to learn which are the busiest times, what complimentary transport is offered, whether staff help customers to their vehicles, and so on.
- A wheelchair-bound colleague was asked to visit several departments in one large store, to see which members of staff were most helpful and to determine the accuracy of earlier complaints from physically-challenged shoppers that certain members of staff were rude and insensitive to their special needs. On another occasion she was asked to visit several stores to determine which were most user-friendly to shoppers in wheelchairs and to suggest ways for the client to improve his own service to disabled shoppers.
- Another colleague was asked to be deliberately rude to sales assistants to check their reaction, and was even paid to shoplift to test response and efficiency of store detectives! To show how effective mystery shopping can be for users, the colleague asked to shoplift failed to be apprehended, suggesting security was slack and forcing management to initiate newer, more efficient security methods.
- A company specializing in, say, board games, will invariably use teams of people (focus groups) to play the game and report back on entertainment potential, clarity of rules and instructions, ease of play, and to suggest any improvements to make the product more popular to more potential buyers before the game is ever brought to market.
Extract from: Be a Mystery Shopper GET PAID TO SHOP … and keep everything you ‘buy’ completely free of charge! byAvril Harper
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Mystery Shopping Facts
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