By David Jenkin
Mystery or ‘secret’ shopping is nothing new. Professionals pose as members of the public to perform an undercover assessment of a business. The concept first rose to popularity as long ago as the 1940s as a way to measure employee integrity and performance. It found applications beyond the retail industry, and has been utilised in real estate, banking, hospitality, fashion, pharmacology and telecommunications to name just a few.
Flies on the wall
With time, the method evolved to incorporate newer technology, going from simple questionnaires that mystery shoppers would fill out, to audio and video recordings. Today, hidden cameras can be very small and video mystery shopping has been rising in popularity as a result.
Willie Osterweil, writer and editor for
The New Inquiry magazine, writes in an essay titled
The Secret Shopper, “Mystery shoppers are workaday spies, moms cruising the mall with an eye to shelf organisation and timely welcome greetings. They are the front-line grunts in corporate espionage, the preferred ‘objective parties’ for internal corporate-performance evaluation and data gatherers for marketing firms.”
He continues, “Most often, mystery shoppers are hired by companies to do internal audits – to monitor the affective labour of employees in a way that managers, whose presence over the workers’ shoulders changes their behaviour, cannot.”
Pros and cons
In a post written by staff on the company’s blog, Dublin-based market research company,
Upfront Analytics, offers a list of pros and cons to mystery shopping. They first emphasise the need for shoppers to be properly briefed on what information and experiences to look out for.
If done properly and thoroughly, they say, a bevy of benefits can be revealed. These include (in addition to staff evaluation) competitor analysis, checking that new policies are implemented, and acquiring informal opinions on any aspect of the customer journey from displays to cleanliness.
However, there are also cons. The Upfront Analytics team list four major drawbacks and limitations to mystery shopping. Firstly, bias can skew results as mystery shopping is subjective by its very nature. People also shop in different ways and mystery shopping only shows how one type of customer shops.
“It’s important to compare mystery shopping results with those of the ideal customer profile,” they say. They list the singular experience of mystery shopping as another, explaining, “A mystery shopper’s experience in a store only represents one interaction with employees and location. A busy day, short staff, or any number of mishaps can affect one experience, but not truly represent a regular customer visit.”
A significant drawback is the low volume of data. “Unlike in-store surveys, online polls, or focus groups, mystery shopping is a one-man job. Because a mystery shopping excursion takes time and money (and because the shopper can only visit one store at a time) data volume can be low,” says the Upfront Analytics team.
Complementing methods
Mike Metelerkamp, managing director of Cape Town-based mystery shopping specialists,
Clandestine Insights, says they offer mystery shopping services as well as survey-based services. “Surveys are effective for collecting large sets of data or opinions,” he says, “Where mystery shopping gives brands visibility into their stores from the eyes of the consumer and allows for each step of the customer journey, including a purchase, to be documented.”
He says that Clandestine has utilised developments in technology, but not for covert recordings. “Rather than going the video route, we invested in real-time mobile apps, allowing us to grow a base of over 20 000 mystery shoppers who use the app to find nearby jobs, upload feedback and get paid.”
In short, mystery shopping has useful applications for gaining specific insights, but it’s not a perfect, all-encompassing solution. Modern technology has enriched it to a point, but it remains a relatively simple method of research, and it’s likely to be around for a while yet.
What are your thoughts on the mystery shopper method of research? Tell us in the comments below.