Mystery Customer and Mystery Shopper Techniques

Mystery Customers and Shoppers can provide behavioual feedback on customer service standards, providing objective baseline and recurring data for training, appraisal, and brand image development.

Mystery Customer and Mystery Shopper surveys provide objective, direct information on the performance of your front office and customer service functions. Mystery customers are quite simply field research staff that take on the role of a legitimate customer of your operation. They complete enquiries, purchases, or simple observation, and report back on their customer experience via standardized checklists and report forms, designed to reflect the service components of your brand, service or product.

Mystery shopping and mystery customer services are typically used by the airline, retail, and hospitality industries - in fact any operation where customer contact and service is integral to the success of the brand.

The key advantage of mystery customer techniques is their focus on direct measureable, and objective criteria based on observational research techniques. It focuses on what people do rather than what they say they do, would like to do, or are supposed to do.

Key factors to keep in mind are:

The ethnic group, age, and appearance of the mystery customer: Mystery customers are usually selected on the basis of their similarity to target customers but some hotels for example are concerned that certain ethnic groups are treated less well than others, and wish to collect objective data on this for use in developing customer service training. Times of day: Mystery shoppers may visit at certain critical times such as peak hours, or randomly throughout the day.

The checklist and report form: These must specifically target critical operations and standards developed systematically by the client and provider from material such as operations and training manuals. It must be as objective as possible, using behaviours that can be observed directly rather than "interpreted". (e.g. "Staff returned smile" as one of a set of items representing "Friendliness" rather than the latter fairly subjective criteria by itself). The report forms need to be standardized so that ratings can be compared across offices or outlets.

Orient Pacific Century selects mystery customers from it's region wide casual and full-time field staff, representing a cosmopolitan selection of ethnicity, age groups, appearance, and other factors. This enables us to provide trained mystery customers best suited to your needs. We work with the client in developing observational checklists and forms from standardized forms adapted to the clients needs, followed up by pre-testing, and the schedule of visits and finally by provision of comparative reports. These services can be provided on a one-time or recurring basis.