Mystery Shopping

Mystery shopping is one of those things that people hear being advertised sometimes and are not fully sure if it's legitimate or not. It seems an unusual idea that a company would pay someone to pretend to be a paying customer and spy on their own staff. When you think about it a bit further though it's actually not that unusual at all.

I have experience personally of working for a market research company carrying out phone surveys. Before I did that job I thought there was some ulterior motive to the types of calls that you sometimes get asking you what your favourite brand of soup is for example. In fact market surveys are a legitimate form of research which help to improve the products and services that we use.

Mystery shopping approaches market research from a different angle. Rather than asking a consumer what their reactions are some time after they have used their service companies hire a mystery shopping service such as Bestmark.com to send shoppers in and test them out and report back when the experience is still fresh in their mind.

The feedback is helpful in finding out if the high standards that a company sets itself are being followed all the way to ground level where customers have first hand experience of it.