In the last two issues, we talked about the basic principles of Mystery Shopping , about the work processes, about the specificity of such research, about who the secret buyers are, what the price depends on, what the request for an offer should contain… In this text, we will point out a few unusual examples from this area.
The advantage of working on projects is reflected in the fact that unusual and interesting situations arise. You can’t always control the outcome, and sometimes you can’t even control the beginning! Here are some examples that show this.
Our colleagues from the Czech Republic received a request to do a Mystery Visit and Mystery Shopping in, no less, than – monasteries!? Of course, none of the secret shoppers went to pray falsely or question the priests, but to establish the facts. Colleagues considered that the request was specific but did not violate ethical and moral rules, and they performed their task professionally.
There are also projects that are carried out in an unusual way, to say the least. Thus, in the United States of America, a national Mystery Shopping project was organized in which the secret shoppers were teenagers from 12 to 16 years old. Their task was to order and buy adult movies. It is interesting that the project was commissioned by the US Government. Of course, the parents of those teenagers were involved in the process.
In Russia, our colleagues received a request for Mystery Shopping from a large public company in which over 4,000 visits throughout the country would be made in the first wave. Amazing number, isn’t it? Even more interesting was that the task in almost half of the planned visits (1,700) was to check if the object even existed or not!?
In Ukraine, a few years ago, the Mystery Shopping project was started in a sales chain that has its own stores in places that are almost inaccessible to someone who does not live there. Making visits in such conditions is specific because it was not a rare case that for a visit lasting 10 minutes almost the whole day was spent, because the journey took many hours.
However, it happens that the requests are so unusual that it is not surprising that some projects are rejected. I also wrote earlier that the Mystery Shopping method is newer both in the world and in our country, so due to its misunderstanding it happens that requests are completely atypical.
Thus, in Australia, a client dealing with the repair and installation of windshields requested that a mystery shopper break the glass on his own car so that he could assess in a real situation what kind of service he would receive. Although the client wanted to pay the amount that the mystery shopper would have, our colleagues refused the job because they felt it was unethical to ask a man to break his own car window. Of course, let’s not talk about the fact that an injury could have occurred while performing that task, which is unacceptable.
In Sweden, it was requested that a scenario be planned for an incident in which the buyer would have the right to sue the seller in one case and the competition in another case. Colleagues rejected this project, because it not only violates the research method, but also ethical and moral norms.
In neighboring Croatia, our colleagues were asked to have a secret buyer visit a hotel with an overnight stay. Nothing out of the ordinary, right? However, the mystery shopper would be tasked with running out of the hotel in the middle of the night and not paying the bill! Again, this would be a highly unethical and immoral act. The essence of Mystery Shopping is not to trick the seller into an unenviable situation, but to determine the behavior in real time and in real circumstances.
As can be seen from these examples, it will take some time for the concept of this type of research to be properly understood even in developed markets. So, although these requests were unusual and creative, Mystery Shopping is not espionage, spoofing and fraud, it is a method aimed at determining performance.
In Sweden, a client asked secret shoppers to memorize the models, features, prices, interface of 25 different products. Of course, this is not possible, so our colleagues from the MSPA network have found a solution. The customer didn’t have to memorize all of those things, but he learned the key points from the script, and the customer got exactly what he wanted and was satisfied.
In Turkey, for example, there was a case where a premium department store asked a secret shopper to make a purchase (the cheapest item in that department store is 75 EUR) and spend an hour trying on different clothes. One could say – a perfectly normal request, what’s the problem? The problem was that they did not want to refund or return the goods, and the price of the visit was significantly less than the price of the item. Ok, you could say this was a tactic to negotiate the price, but the department store representative was amazed that the topic was discussed at all and reasoned that it was a great honor for the mystery shopper to be selected for this job, given the strict criteria, and an even greater honor to be in their department store.
However, most projects are structured correctly from the start, with the client’s desire to improve their product or service. It is estimated that if only 10% of customers can achieve a 1% improvement in the category of consumer satisfaction, it will increase sales significantly.
Mystery Shopping surveys can often be planned in such a way as to increase income or decrease expenditure in a measurable monetary way. For example, an Icelandic chain of liquor stores found through this research that only 23% of their sellers ask for an ID from a customer when they are not sure that they are of legal age. After 18 months and their involvement in sales training, that share has grown to almost 70%. In this way, the savings in fines were many times higher than the project price itself.
Also, by organizing a promotional raffle in his facilities, one Croatian seller managed to obtain such high-quality information related to the setting of promotional materials in just a few days by engaging our partner’s secret buyers from the MSPA network, that he increased sales by 500,000 EUR in a very short period of time. The
So, as seen from these interesting examples and creative requests, the Mystery Shopping method has great possibilities and wide applicability. It can be a key factor in increasing revenue, reducing costs and increasing company value, but it is also a point of misunderstanding. This, as well as my previous two articles in InStor, aimed to make this method even closer to readers, but also to remove some taboos related to Mystery Shopping .