PFA Research

Customer satisfaction surveys and the number of complaints received provide useful insights into the ‘customer experience’. Similarly, the more tangible aspects of your service are often readily measurable; for example, timelines for delivery, telephone response times, etc. However, other aspects of customer service can be more difficult to measure, such as trustworthiness and loyalty, which may be relative to the nature of actual service delivery to the expectations generated.

Mystery shopping provides customer feedback from the perspective of the researcher as the ‘customer’. Therefore mystery shopping provides a means to ‘test’ and ‘measure’ the quality of the service your organisation provides. This can be in terms of your organisation's own performance against the set standards and / or in comparison to that of your competitors. 

Mystery shopping provides a cost-effective method for monitoring the quality of your customer service. It can help you to discover the ‘reality’ of the customer service experience provided by your organisation. Mystery shopping can tell you:

• Whether actual service delivery conforms to expected standards;
• How loyal customers feel towards your company based on their last use of the service;
• How ‘valued’ your organisation makes them feel as a customer;
• Whether they feel they were treated with respect.

Mystery shopping also offers organisations opportunities for identifying weaknesses within service delivery, benchmarking performance against competitors, ensuring staff are following correct procedures and help identify those staff delivering a service beyond expectations.

Mystery shopping involves researchers acting as customers. The mystery shopper undertakes the purchasing process in order to evaluate the quality of the service provided.

The typical process for mystery shopping research involves designing objective ‘rating’ measures, undertaking the ‘shopping’ process, assessing the quality of service against the agreed standards and providing feedback to your organisation. 

Your organisation can elect to use mystery shopping as a one-off experience to measure current performance against set standards. Alternatively you may decide to use it on a regular basis as a means to consistently monitor standards and to drive forward improvements in customer service.