 Mystery
Shopping – A true research method?
Paul has
extensive business and analysis experience and
maintains a close relationship with the Call
Centre Association (CCA), having been involved
with the sponsorship and direction of CCA Research
Institute. |
I was recently discussing with a client the progress
we had made with their worldwide mystery shopping
programme. We have only been working with them for
6 months but already we had begun to re-shape the
organisation’s attitude towards mystery shopping.
However, we both agreed we had a long way to go!
Mystery shopping is a common but often misunderstood
or over-used method of research. It is not the ‘be
all and end all’ that many operations or quality
managers make-out! As a quick check of operational
processes it can be very useful, but it is often misquoted
as an objective measure of ‘customer experience’.
I say this with no hesitation, despite Teleconomy
being the 7th largest (and probably the largest telephone-based)
mystery shopping organisation in the UK!
In its crudest sense, mystery shopping is no more
than an assessment of what I (or someone else) think
of the service. A key part to mystery shopping is
not actually how the data is collected (the mystery
visit or telephone call) but how the results are analysed
and collated. All visits or calls should be analysed
or marked against a list of criteria, in the same
way that a consumer answers a survey. But the fact
remains that these visits and calls are not consumers
– it is an artificial situation. And if we also
use a pre-prescribed list of criteria used by our
client, then we further decrease the objectivity of
the exercise.
Returning to my client situation above, mystery shopping
has been employed very successfully for over 10 years,
but it has probably been over-used and mistreated
in its application. They have probably over-spent
on volumes of mystery shopping calls and under-spent
on consumer-led research such as perception surveys
– in fact they had never undertaken the latter
until they worked with Teleconomy.
The reasoning behind my statement comes with an assessment
of their objectives. In the situation of my client,
the objective is twofold – on one hand to give
operational data on process and training to each office
manager, but on the other hand to provide information
to the board on the progress of their CRM strategy.
The former can accept a degree of subjectivity, so
mystery shopping is suitable, but to get a more objective
view of the whole company’s customer management,
the customers themselves must be involved in the assessment
process.
Teleconomy carried out an extensive consumer research
programme to understand the expectations and importance
levels across our client’s customer base. From
this, a CRM strategy was designed and agreed. The
data was also used to set the criteria and prioritise
the measures to be used in mystery shopping. The measures
were also weighted to reflect the relative importance
of each to reduce subjectivity.
Teleconomy will now move the emphasis from monthly
mystery shopping to quarterly mystery shopping. This
will improve the sample sizes on which findings are
based, whilst also freeing up budget to plough into
bi-annual customer perception studies – which
will provide the objective assessment of progress
the board requires, and corroborate the mystery shopping.
In summary, the design of any mystery shopping exercise
needs to be carefully considered in light of the project
objective. If it is to provide operational information
to allow managers to intervene in processes, procedures
or training, then it is a useful tool as it is more
about qualitative information and checking against
internally designed processes. If it is used as an
objective measure of ‘customer experience’
then we need to look further afield for our information.
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