| Mystery Shopping |
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Mystery shopping is a tool used by Market Research companies to measure quality of retail service. These companies send '''mystery shoppers''' to 'act' as shoppers in return for some combination of cash, store credit, purchase discounts, or reimbursement for the the goods or services purchased. Instructions to mystery shoppers can include a script of behavior, questions to ask, complaints to give, purchases to make, and measures to record, such as time it takes to receive attention from an employee or receive a service, or the responses given to questions. Mystery shopping is also known as:
HISTORY Mystery shopping began in the 1940s and as a mechanism to measure employee integrity. Tools used for mystery shopping assessments can range from simple Questionnaire s to complete Audio and Video recordings. Many mystery shopping companies are completely administered through the Internet, allowing potential mystery shoppers to use the Internet to register for participation, find mystery shopping jobs and receive payment. The most common venues to be mystery shopped are retail stores, movie theatres, restaurants, fast food chains, banks, gas stations, car dealerships, apartments, and health clubs. Virtually any context where there is a customer/business interaction is open to mystery shopping, including on-line surveys. More and more companies are beginning to see the value in experience measurement techniques such as mystery shopping, and as such larger organizations such as Hotels , Retail Chains, and even Airlines have engaged companies for these purposes. In the UK , mystery shopping is increasingly used to provide feedback on customer services provided by local authorities and other non-profit organisations (eg Housing Associations). METHODOLOGY When a client company comes on board with a company providing Mystery Shopping services, a survey model will be drawn up and agreed to which defines what information and improvement factors the client company wishes to measure as part of the mystery shopping process. These are then drawn up into survey instruments and assignments that are allocated to shoppers registered with the mystery shopping company in question. Some of the common details and information points shoppers will be looking for include:
Shoppers are often given instructions or procedures to make the transaction atypical to make the test of the knowledge and service skills of the employees more stringent or specific to a particular service issue (known as scenarios). For instance, a mystery shopper at a restaurant may pretend they are Lactose-intolerant , or a clothing store mystery shopper could inquire about gift-wrapping services. Not all Mystery Shopping scenarios include a purchase. From there, the shopper will then submit the data collected to the Mystery Shopping company in question. The data is then reviewed and analyzed before quantitative and qualitative statistical {Link without Title} reports on the data are then returned to the client company that enables measurement against the previously defined criteria. STATISTICS The Mystery shopping industry had an estimated value of nearly $600 million in the United States in 2004 {Link without Title} , according to a 2005 report commissioned by the Mystery Shopping Providers Association (MSPA). Companies that participated in the report experienced an average growth of 11.1 percent from 2003 to 2004, compared to an average growth of 12.2 percent. The report estimates more than 8.1 million mystery shops were conducted in 2004. The Report represents the first industry association attempt to quantify the size of the mystery shopping industry.Similar surveys are available for European regions where mystery shopping is becoming more embedded into company procedures. ISSUES Ethics Mystery Shoppers are always bound by a relevant set of rules or ethics code. The most widely used set of professional guidelines and ethics standards for the industry is . Fraud There exists a scam that uses mystery shopping as a Premise for Fraud , where a person is sent a bad check with a request to deposit it into their bank account, wire a portion of the money through a Wire Transfer company such as Western Union and keep the remainder as a mystery shopping fee, and informed to mail the money immediately as the test is evaluating response time. People who wire the "remainder" discover the check is bad and lose the money they transfer and the Wire Transfer service fee. One such fraud involves Trans Global Evaluators, a sham mystery shopping company based in Quebec, Canada. {Link without Title} Another example of a cheque cashing scheme masquerading as a mystery shopper assignment appears to be coming from Kitchener, Ontario, Canada under the company name of "The Shopping Group Inc." Local legitimate mystery shopping companies have been affected by the news, including Shoppers Confidential Inc. and in response, they have included a warning on their site about the scam: {Link without Title} SEE ALSO REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS Overview
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