Through mystery shopping the client wants to know what is actually going on in a store and whether various store parameters are being maintained as they should be. Often findings of mystery shopping can force the organization to revisit its processes and introduce sweeping changes to attain the ultimate goal of customer satisfaction through standardization.
A mystery shopping report hence becomes a tool of change that has the potential of impacting company policies and altering its work process.
The criticality of a mystery shopping report can also be stressed by the fact that many organizations use it to identify the top performers in their front line and incentivize them, the reverse is also true where a client can use a mystery shopping report to reprimand an employee for breach of processes.
Hence it becomes important for the auditor to be very accurate in representing the situations encountered in the shop.
Any questionnaire is designed to capture some specific aspects of a shop and often limits itself at those due to various constraints, however it might happen that the auditor happens to notice something beyond the scope of the questionnaire which is impacting the performance of the store.
It is for this reason that a comment box is almost always provided with every question or at the end of every section in the questionnaire. It is expected that the auditor will provide appropriate comments to let the client know the reason for a negative experience so that the client is able to work on it.
Knowing someone did not have a good experience without knowing what caused the same is not very useful and is very difficult to be corrected.
Chances are the shopper and all customers will continue to have sour experiences since the issue was not reported in the mystery shopping report and hence could not be worked upon.
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