International Service Quality Mystery Shopper Essay

International Service Quality Mystery Shopper - Essay Example In short, mystery shopping is a tool that helps companies in understanding where their services stand and helps them to rectify the problems their customers face and improve their services. 1 Mystery shopping was basically developed in the 1940s and 1950s in order to expose the deceitful employees that were working for companies. In the early days, much of it was carried out by private investigators and many had no idea about what the term actually meant. With the passage of time, many of the companies realized that the information revealed with the help of mystery shopping services was far more authentic and important in helping to improve their business. Also, the information revealed about customer care service issues, safety and environment were also considered important and service providing companies realized that the information about the operations was far more important than any other data (Ilisha, 2004). The most common places where mystery shopping techniques are applied are the services industry, such as movie theatres, restaurants, banks, fast food chains, health clubs etc where much emphasis is paid on the service quality and their customer base and reputation is dependent on it. Therefore, the management of these companies make sure they have sound methods and techniques to gauge their services in a non-biased way in order to correct any faults.2 HOW IT WORKS A mystery shopper first has to register himself/herself to an organization specialized to conduct mystery shopping. There is a Mystery Shopping Providers Association with which companies are registered and provide mystery shopping services to the people. The mystery shopper once registered, is given an assignment, specific to the area in which he or she is living and a number of topics on which he or she has to undertake the assignment. Most of the dealings between the company and the mystery shopper are done online which reduces the hassle of paper work for the mystery shopper and it is a source of easy money for many. MYSTERY SHOPPING AND MARKET RESEARCH Mystery shopping is considered as a tool of market research as it helps to understand the market a company is catering too. However, it is different from market research on many accounts. Mystery research is more associated to operations research. Mystery research is more of an operational research that provides feedback on quality control, training and inducement purposes. These shoppers are specially recruited in such a way that their demographics and social profile is similar to the target market of the organization. Mystery shoppers also visit certain areas and on certain times, it cannot predict every customer's opinion and experience of the service (Mystery-Shoppers.co.uk, 2008). Also, customer satisfaction cannot be gauged because a mystery shopper is just a job that the shopper is doing and customer satisfaction relates to the subjective idea of a real customer's thinking. Therefore, mystery shopping should just not be used to gauge customer satisfaction. Mystery shopping provides us with a unique feedback of the customer and the people who are the mystery shoppers exactly know what they have to evaluate and the front line workers who are being evaluated have no idea about it. However, ethical