Mystery Shopping offers companies a new way to evaluate the customer service quality of their business from the customer’s perspective. Mystery Shopping is used to measure quality of retail service or gather specific information about products and services. Mystery shoppers posing as customers perform specific tasks—such as purchasing a product, asking questions, registering complaints or behaving in a certain way – and then provide detailed reports or feedback about their experiences.

While gathering information, shoppers usually blend in to the store being evaluated as regular shoppers. FGI uses handheld mobile devices while conducting the mystery shop, the devices are inconspicuous and remove the room for error by completing the interview on paper after the shopper has finished the mystery shop.

Shoppers are often given instructions or procedures to make the transaction atypical to make the test of the knowledge and service skills of the employees more stringent or specific to a particular service issue (known as scenarios).The most common venues where mystery shopping is used are retail stores, movie theatres, restaurants, fast food chains, banks, petrol stations, car dealerships as well as health clubs.

The details and information points shoppers take note of typically include:

• number of employees in the store on entering
• how long it takes before the mystery shopper is greeted
• the name of the employee(s)
• whether or not the greeting is friendly, ideally according to objective measures
• the types of products shown
• whether or how the employee attempted to close the sale
• whether the employee invited the shopper to come back to the store
• cleanliness of store and store associates
• speed of service
• compliance with company standards relating to service, store appearance, and grooming/presentation