Why Mystery Shopping is a waste of your resources?

Mystery Shopping on staff

Can you find out the analogy between mystery shopping and a microscope?

A microscope magnifies the objects or particles that can’t be seen with naked eye. Mystery shopping magnifies various strata of customer experience. It has the capability of capturing even the smallest details that are more likely to escape the eyes of an average shopper.

The fundamental aspects

An ideal mystery shopping program has three basic parts -

Hindsight – It includes finding the existing problem areas or the loopholes in a business.

Insight – is based on the key findings, it includes the critical aspect to the business.

Foresight – It comprises the approaches through which the problem areas can be tackled or eliminated.


Waste! Waste!! Waste!!!

For some businesses mystery shopping is no less than ‘a wastage of resources’.

Of course, conducting mystery shopping programs is wastage of resources, if your mystery shopping services provider does not worth its salt or if there is no collaborative approach between you and your service provider.

A magic wand to unravel

A mystery shopping program when executed and implemented properly does the following things –

• Highlights the exact points associated with your business where services, products and sales goals are not being recognized, understood or met.

• Sheds light on the elements of customer experience that are being overlooked or not executed in a consistent pattern.

• Helps a business compare its model customer engagement plan with its real (in-store) counterpart.

Let’s consider an example of a retail store, apparel department:
  • Are your store-associates helping out your customers find the specific things they are looking for?


  • Are the dresses of particular brands arranged size-wise in an ascending order (XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL)?


  • Is anyone there outside the trial room to cater to the specific needs of the customers, like finding the right size and fit?


  • Is there any staff right there in the trial area to count the number of dress that are being taken inside for trial?


  • Are your store executives assisting well or are too clingy that suffocates the customers while choosing an outfit?

However, if your mystery shopping partner fails to provide you with the above mentioned reports or you somehow fail to take the right actions on the right time (on the basis of the audit reports), failure is inevitable. Quite obviously, when a program fails it feels like wastage of your resources.

The most important part

In order to gather better foresight via mystery shopping, the main ingredient is - collaborative mindset between you and your mystery shopping service provider. If this master ingredient falls short, the final recipe is bound to taste bad.

Let’s find out the areas where a company fails to channelize its mystery shopping programs by not acting as per the need of the situation –

• You need to make the audit reports actionable. For this you have to consider the reports related to your retail stores.

• You need to take action on your store associates on the basis of the findings. It can be done by devising appropriate training programs for them.

• You need to deploy MAP or Manager Action Plan or the reports. It allows you make your store managers more responsible and define the steps they would take to make ensure that the negatives, if any, are being handled well.

• You should monitor the trends of the parameter scores over a period.

• You need to build data points that are gathered during different audit sessions.

These are some of the most important things you need to do to make your mystery shopping programs fetch positive results. If you oversee, then it will be a complete waste of your resources and nothing more than that.

To get the most out of your mystery shopping program, hire a good service provider like HS Brands and get going.



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