Retail audits

Mystery shopping

Mystery shopping, or secret shopping, is a widely used way of auditing the point of sale.

Our goal

Gather information, assess and measure the quality of customer service, and evaluate staff performance and product knowledge.

It relies on the “mystery shopper”, also known as a “secret shopper”, who observes, interacts with staff and makes mock purchases or uses products and services at the selected outlets. Mystery shopping is commissioned by brands themselves to learn their strengths and weaknesses, by their distributors, and even by competitors who want to understand what they do well.

Unlike other methods, mystery shopping relies on observation by a specially trained agent working undercover.

A mystery shopping report should set out what the mystery shopper actually experienced, so the company gets as objective a picture as possible of the service it gives its customers: the sales or consumption process, the way staff look after customers and other important issues.

This is how mystery shopping helps companies find where service can improve at every point of contact with the end customer.

Mystery shopping relies on a few working tools, essentially a questionnaire and a briefing. The briefing supports the shopper, defines the questions and concepts used and explains what to do if something unexpected happens.

At A10 we make sure the questionnaire not only measures what needs evaluating, objectively and in an organised way, but also that what it evaluates is what really matters to our clients.

The questionnaire is a set of objective questions, not too long, which the mystery shopper fills in online after each visit to record the experience. How it is designed and what it measures are key to making the research useful.