Tips for building an effective Mystery Shopping program

The most effective way to build a Mystery Shopping program is by ensuring that you have first clearly and precisely established your objectives.  After all, if you don't have a very clear idea of what you are looking for, chances are you aren't going to find it.  The better defined the objectives, the better quality the results.

Once the objectives of your Mystery Shopping program are established, the next step is to determine the specific criteria you would like measured. This criteria might include elements of the sales process, customer service, procedure and policy issues, employee availability, general attitude, aspects of a promotion, or any number of other things.  You then need to weight them in relative importance to each other, so that you can achieve a quantitative representation of a customer's experience with your business.

Now that you have your objectives and criteria, the next step is to develop the mystery shopping strategy.  At this stage, there are many things to take into consideration: frequency of shops, timing, execution, format, scenarios, etc.  It is critical that the strategy be clearly developed, or the information you receive may not be accurate, representative or useful.