Mystery shoppers have been a staple of the retail industry for decades; but, with the rising popularity of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and other direct forms of customer interaction like voice of the customer programs, are mystery shoppers becoming a thing of the past? The Mystery Shoppers Providers Association (MSPA) doesn't think so.

Judi Hess, president of MSPA and founder of mystery shopping firm Customer Perspectives, calls mystery shopping "a means to measure customer service, product knowledge, and sales ability." More important, she says, it offers subjective, targeted feedback that companies just can't get from less structured kinds of feedback, like social networking tools or surveys.

Ron Welty, MSPA board member and founder of IntelliShop, says comparing mystery shopping to social networking feedback is like comparing apples to oranges. "Mystery shopping captures specific, detailed information from people who are pre-coached on exactly what the client wants evaluated," he says. Conversely, customers who fill out surveys or post comments about a service or product on the Web tend to do so because they have had a bad—or at least abnormal—experience. This leads to emotional reactions, Welty and Hess agree, where it is virtually impossible to get a complete and accurate picture of what happened.

"Social media can only capture customer opinions, emotions, and thoughts," Welty says. "That's important information to have, but it does not replace the type of research generated by mystery shopping, and vice-versa. We have not seen any [company] substitute one for the other."

Service Credit Union enjoys the mystery
New Hampshire's Service Credit Union relies on mystery shopping to keep up with customer expectations. Dan Clark, vice president of branch administration for Service Credit Union, says that branch employees are expected to use customers' names during transactions; it's a very important part of the customer experience. "So many times, when someone goes into their financial institution the customer has the feeling that they are just an account number rather than a person with needs," Clark says. "By using their name, it makes the member feel more comfortable, and our staff becomes more familiar with our 'regulars' at the branches."

Clark uses mystery shoppers to check whether employees are doing so, as well as to learn other information that he could not find out any other way. For example, they check the quality of the landscaping outside and the appropriate placement of signage, something customers wouldn't necessarily notice.

Service Credit Union tries to get a mystery shopper into each of its 16 U.S. branches at least once a week, but also uses them for call center, fax, and email interactions. "One of the things that's interesting is that you have the perception of the member, versus the perception of the branch or employee," says Clark, when discussing reports that tellers were not using names during transactions. The tellers, however, were certain that they had. As it turned out, the tellers were saying things like, "Goodbye, Mr. Smith, have a nice day." Because the name was used at the end of a transaction it didn't register with customers, so Service Credit Union asked employees to use customers' names at the beginning, middle, and end of a transaction.

Mystery shopping may not be in danger of being replaced by Web 2.0, but that doesn't mean technology hasn't changed the industry. Clark says he's been using mystery shoppers for 21 years, and when he first started he received long, hand-written reports. "Now you get an email with a PDF and a list of all the shops that happened in that day—with graphs and charts and dashboards," he says.

Going forward, IntelliShop's Welty sees plenty of opportunities for mystery shopping to enhance more direct forms of customer feedback. "The two types of research work well together," he says. "For example, customers at a bank drive-through can tell you whether their time in line felt too long; mystery shopping can tell you specifically how long, and then repeated visits can measure for improvement in that area, to the second." In other words, there is more than enough room in the realm of customer experience for all the players, and as Customer Perspectives' Hess says, "the really astute companies will do both."