Mystery shopping involves having individuals pose as customers to evaluate customer service and experience. It is used by companies to check on aspects like delivery, after-sales service, and in-store experience. Mystery shopping provides an outside perspective on quality to help brands better serve customers and increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat purchases. Ethical standards require informing staff they may be evaluated and protecting individuals' privacy, with data stored or destroyed securely. Surveys should resemble real customer scenarios and focus on factual questions while allowing notes.

1. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
HOW MUCH ARE YOU WORTH?
WE CAN TELL, TO MAKE YOUR COMPANY BETTER
IN THE EYES OF YOUR CUSTOMERS.

2. MYSTERY SHOPPING
a quality service
for quality in service

3. MYSTERY SHOPPING
Increasing difficulties in selling
whatsoever kind of product or service,
either for market saturation in certain business segments,
and for a moment in time
with low aim to spend,
drive attention from brands/retailers
on how to better serve their customers,
towards fidelization and consequentely
the repetition of purchase.
Both B2B and B2C operators
launched check activities
on customer satisfaction,
as after-sales check, including the control on receipt delivery,
and after-service check, when there are service activities
for the customer coming later than
the sale itself.

4. MYSTERY SHOPPING Customer satisfaction
is just to bring outside the value of
the overall quality of the store;
the store is nothing more than the last production step
in the production flow,
and as in any production flow
every step has its own customer;
in this case, in the sale step, we have
THE CUSTOMER
as seen as the one that benefits
of the total quality generated in previous steps.
Poor quality perceived in the store
qualifies brands as poor quality brands;
this is why
best performing brands/retailers
put a lot of care
on how their product / service
gets in the hands of the end customer.

5. Ethics
A mystery shopping survey checks mainly personnel behaviour
and how internal procedures as defined by Company standards
are respected.
The goal of each survey is to help to improve in the quality delivered,
in order to maximize the customer satisfaction.
A mystery shopping survey could never be utilized as unique tool for
punishment or lay-off.
The correct ethical conduct requires that staff subject, directly or indirectly,
to a mystery shopping survey has to be informed from main contractor that
their behaviour with customers will be monitored through the mystery
shopping survey.
MYSTERY SHOPPING

6. Ethics & Technique
Scenarios for mystery shopping surveys must be safe,
meaning that mystery shopper must never be required
of illegal actions, hazardous actions,
or to communicate or record
unauthorized information violating privacy
either at the moment of the survey
or later on with unexpected follow-ups.
Staff subject to the survey
has to be informed on what is the purpose of the same,
on how data collected will be utilized,
and on how these data will be presented.
Both the contractor and the survey company
must guarantee privacy-wise
the proper management on storing data collected, or the destruction of same,
either paper, audio recording, filming or other, as used during the survey.
MYSTERY SHOPPING

7. Definition of checks and criteria
The questionnaire must contain questions with a clear focus on facts.
To support the meaning of data, it is important to allow free space to
report personal individual mystery shopper notes.
If the survey is made on a competitor,
the survey should always include
the actual purchase of a product/service of such competitor.
If there is not a purchase, all questions/actions with the staff must be
respecting same guidelines driving the end customer of such competitor.
Scenario where mystery shoppers perform the survey must be
as much real as possible,
meaning that it must comply with behaviour and request
well representing such market, and timing and content of visits
must adhere to a real client attitude.
MYSTERY SHOPPING

8. survey easy to identify, to
allow further in-depth
analyses

9. custom-made
content based on project
definition and different
products/service category

10. custom-made reports
and comparison as per
content and time of the
survey can be added to
standard reporting

11. +39-0124-33493
+39-388-0458040
revello@revelloassociati.it
Via Contini 6 – 10011 Agliè (Torino) Italia
Some definitions are from MSPA Europe guidelines (MYSTERY SHOPPING PROVIDERS ASSOCIATION)