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Welcome to Part 3 in our Mystery Shopper Research Series — where we cover common research objectives for Mystery Shopper Research along with real-world examples.
This article is part of our Mystery Shopper Research Series — practical insights on designing, running, and learning from Mystery Shopper programs.
In Part 3 we:
- Add the term current state to our descriptive data
- Introduce our 7-Step Design Process for a Mystery Shopper Program
- Work through Step 1: “What do I want to learn?” with examples
- Introduce triangulation — using multiple research methods to examine the same issue
Establishing Current State
We’ve established that Mystery Shopper findings sit in the Descriptive layer of the CX Metrics Architecture: they show what actually happened. Which obviously impacts Customer perception.
Let’s add a helpful label: current state.
A Mystery Shopper program reveals how things work right now — the current state of what actually happens across the journeys and touchpoints you decide to study.
Clients call this their reality check. They may choose for their programs to incorporate:
- 45 meetings with various insurance agents to assess the current quality of agent advice
- 15 overnight stays in a boutique hotel to understand the hotel’s current experience delivery
- 100 sales enquiry calls made to the Contact Center to learn how well sales cues are currently handled
Some programs re-run at predefined intervals—monthly, quarterly, or annually — to keep a pulse on performance and enable trending.
Our 7-Step Design Process for a Mystery Shopper Program
To help Clients get more from Mystery Shopper Research, we developed a workshop built around our 7-Step Design Process — the same process we use when we design Client programs.
Here is a summary of the 7 Steps – each of which we will cover in detail as we progress through this series. In this article we cover Step 1.
- What do I want to learn? Define and document your research objectives
- What scenarios do I want to test? Define specific journey and/or touchpoint scenarios. Categorize each as Existing Customer, Prospective Customer, or Observation-only.
- Special profiling & selection needs: Specify what shoppers need to be or have (such as a status or product type)
- Select performance standards: Define the standards to be scored and the scoring logic (binary and scaled) with rubrics
- Plan volumes & timing: Build a fieldwork calendar with finalized volumes and cadence
- Design reporting: Decide how results will be presented—both as they come in (such as red flags) and at the final readout
- Design & execute training: Provide paths and scripts for shoppers, plus the tasks and equipment (such as recording devices) needed.
Step 1: Research Objectives — What Do I Want to Learn?
Objectives are the backbone of a successful program. Everything else — including scenarios, standards, sampling, and reporting — flows from answering this question well.
There is an endless variety of possible research objectives for Mystery Shopper and I share some of the most common that we’ve worked on over the past 25+ years:
1) Current-state baseline
Let us know how we are doing right now.
- “We plan to develop a global Concierge training program. We need a current-state assessment of Concierge performance to understand what needs to be included in training.”
- “We lack visibility across our 75 outlets. Run a current-state evaluation of a Customer-Enquiry scenario across our top 15 outlets to find out what’s really going on.”
- “Our Board requires an annual and objective current-state view of our service delivery.”
- “A cross-department journey lacks a Customer-eye view. Walk through the current state journey with Mystery Shoppers to tell us what a Customer actually goes through.”
2) Industry or Competitor Benchmark Research
Compare and learn across other organizations—inside or outside your industry.
- “Do 40 visits to our retail shop and 20 each to five competitors. Show us strengths and weaknesses — and what we can learn from others.”
- “Our industry awards program requires Mystery Shopper benchmarking as part of scoring entries.”
- “Call our Contact Center and those of our top two competitors, and compare and contrast performance.”
A Malaysian Client aimed to be the best service brand in the country — not just the best telecoms provider and that rresearch objective guided the entire program.
3) Change-impact (before/after)
Please evaluate the before and after of our planned change to see if the change ‘worked’.
- “Six months after new software was installed, is it delivering the expected impact?”
- “Benchmark our six-month-old operation in country/region X against our parent company’s existing operation.”
- “We outsourced our Customer Care; objectively evaluate our partner’s quality.”
- “After a three-year CX transformation, are Customers actually benefiting across key journeys?”
4) Compliance / risk / brand safeguards
Validate adherence to required steps and standards or legal requirements.
“Regulators require proper handling for vulnerable Customers. Check how well we’re actually doing with vulnerable Customers — before the official regulator audit takes place.”
5) Explore learnings from other research (VoC, QA, social, etc.)
Use Mystery Shopper to investigate interesting findings, red flags, or patterns that surfaced elsewhere.
- “B2B survey comments raised concerns — study the onboarding journey in depth.”
- “Social sentiment flagged an issue — validate what actually happens.”
- “Airline overweight-luggage complaints vary by airport — run an overweight-luggage scenario across hubs.”
- “Our internal QA rates our tech-support people highly, but CSAT is low — shop the chats to find what, if any, gaps or opportunities exist.”
If the need is to see what is really happening — to add context to learnings from other research — Mystery Shopper can help.
Mystery Shopper Research and Customer Journey Mapping
Triangulation means looking at the same question from multiple angles so your conclusions are more credible. In practice, it’s common to use multiple research methods to study the same thing.
Mystery Shopper can be appropriate and helpful to use along with other research methods — such as Customer journey mapping — to provide more ‘light’ on an issue.
One Client told us:
“We do Customer Journey Mapping where that research approach is relevant. And we do Mystery Shopper Research where that research approach is relevant. And for some journeys and/or touchpoints, we may decide to do both.
Mystery Shopper is fully pre-planned
A banking Client wanted to test whether their counter staff listened for wealth cues after they attended sales training.
So we designed this scenario:
An existing Customer visits a branch for a simple transaction and mentions a recent financial windfall (e.g., property sale). The Shopper observes if — and how well — the Counter Staff introduces them to a Wealth Manager to discuss investment opportunities.
Defined learning points:
- How did the introduction flow?
- Were standards followed?
- How could the hand-off improve?
- Do training or coaching need updates?
- Should the process be re-designed?
Mystery Shoppers don’t ‘make it up as they go.’ They follow a pre-planned flow, defined activities, and key script points.
An unplanned, ‘make-it-up-as-you-go’ approach is a common problem in in-house programs.
Where You Are in This Series
In this Part 3 article we:
- Added the term current state to our Descriptive data lens
- Introduced our 7-Step Design Process for a Mystery Shopper Program
- Worked through Step 1: ‘What do I want to learn?’ with examples
- Introduced triangulation—using multiple research methods to examine the same issue”
In Part 4 we will:
- Locate where we are in the 7-Step Design Process for Mystery Shopper Research
- Explore Mystery Shopper Scenarios — what they are, how they work, and how to classify them
- Specify specialing profiling needs for Mystery Shoppers
- Explain why the design process should be cross-functional
- Define The Magic 20% — the powerful, unexpected learnings you should expect
Thank you for reading!
I regularly share stories, strategies, and insights from our work across Contact Centers, Customer Service, and Customer Experience. If this resonates, I’d love to stay connected.
You can drop me a line anytime, or subscribe via our website.
Daniel Ord
[email protected]
www.omnitouchinternational.com
