Stakeholder Buy-In! Without it your mystery shopping programme will go nowhere. If you are contemplating mystery shopping be certain to consult all stakeholders – most particularly front-line staff.

No desk-bound manager really knows the difficulties of working on the front-line. And yet many managers setting up and managing mystery shopping never get input from the very people who are expected to embrace the changes.

To get the best response from your mystery shopping programme do the following…

Ask current front-line staff for suggestions on design and implementation of your mystery shopping programme.
Inform new hires and new franchisees about mystery shopping at during the selection process.
Make full disclosure about mystery shopping in employment and franchise agreements.

Should your mystery shopping program include rewards for good scores? Everyone responds to rewards – right? But is there actual proof that rewards actually work?

We would do well to turn to a recognised authority for an answer.

“Ultimate Rewards,” published by Harvard University Press is one such authority. In the Table of Contents we see the name of the famous management consultant Peter Drucker who penned one of the chapters. “Harvard” and “Drucker” provide reputation add credibility.

So what do the authors in this anthology actually say?

Some authors dismiss the notion that rewards are effective. Chapter titles like , “Asinine Attitude Toward Motivation”, “Why Incentive Plans can Never Work” and “Rethinking Rewards” transmit the opinion of the author even before we get into the substance of their argument.

Other authors assert that rewards work well and cite evidence to prove it, but they are critical of organisations that misuse or mismanage their rewards. These authors say that “rewards failure” is assured if organisations reward wrong things. They cite rewarding “tasks” and “behaviours” as wrong. Rewards for simply doing stuff doesn’t cut it. On the other hand success is more certain if organisations focus on objectives rather than tasks and on results rather than behaviours.

So where does this leave mystery shopping and rewards?

Mystery shopping measures such things as, “following up a sales lead” and “suggestive selling.” Following up a lead is a task and it’s a behaviour. Suggestive selling is a task and a behaviour. And that’s the problem. Mystery shopping is largely about tasks and behaviours.

The inescapable conclusion is that if we reward high scores or punish low mystery shopping scores we misuse and mismanage the very tool that can help us achieve the results we want.

Mystery shopping is a great servant, but a poor master. Make sure that it serves you well by rewarding results rather than scores.

A mystery shopping programme has many benefits for retailers, but to my way of thinking the top benefit is to provide actionable feedback on Loss Prevention.

There of course an immediate, obvious loss when stock is stolen, but there is a second, very common, less obvious type of loss. It’s the loss when customers walk out without being served. Not only is sales revenue lost, but also a proportion of location cost (rent) and marketing expense which brought the customer to the store in the first place.

Notwithstanding the use of electronic tags and store surveillance systems, thieves who are acknowledged are less likely to steal because they have been noticed. And of course the last thing a thief wants is prompt service. On the other hand honest customers do want to be acknowledged and served within a reasonable time.

Just yesterday morning one of our mystery shoppers roamed around a store for nine minutes without the staff showing any interest. One was playing around on a computer at the front counter; the other was fiddling with stock. Both were apparently oblivious to the shopper and the four customers who were there at the time.

Nine minutes. Plenty of time for a crook to steal. And more than enough time to annoy a waiting customer.

Acknowledgement and prompt service are two of the most effective weapons in both types of loss prevention. This means that, arguably the two most important measurements in a mystery shopping report are…

Time to acknowledge the mystery shopper and…
Time to serve the mystery shopper

In the current economic downturn, as shop stealing becomes more common and paying customers less common, it will pay to keep a close eye on your acknowledgement and service times.

For employees

Your employers have the right to use mystery shopping to to improve sales skills and protect their brand.

For Owners and Managers

If front-line staff “fail” a mystery shop, it is your failure. Who selected and trained them?

For Mystery Shopping Service Providers

Service providers must make their clients aware of the limitations of mystery shopping.

For Mystery Shoppers

Be accurate. Your mystery shopping observations will have repercussions for staff and management.

A customer experience is what the customer says it is. Not what mystery shoppers say it is.

Mystery shoppers get paid to shop. Customers pay to shop.

What mystery shoppers do well is measure processes and standards. Mystery shoppers will tell you if the processes that create the customer experience have met your pre-determined standards, but only your customers can tell you what those standards should be.

The measurement of delays by mystery shopping is a key metric. It’s a given that acknowledgement times, on hold times, and service times appear in virtually all mystery shopping reports. As C. Northcote Parkinson, author of the best seller, Parkinson’s Law, famously said, “delay is the deadliest form of denial.”

But does mystery shopping accurately measure delays? Well, yes and no.

Yes, in that a mystery shopper can measure a queue time, of say five minutes.

No, in that those same five minutes will be perceived differently by different customers.

A customer’s perception of time is affected by variables such as the culture of the customer, the nature of their activity at the time, gender, length of the queue, and even the frequency at which they queue. So it’s not the five minutes that counts, it’s how the customer feels about it. And it’s customer feelings that determine their loyalty. They may forget the words you used, but they never forget how you made them feel.