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Mystery Shopping Scams

Mystery shopping or mystery consumer is a tool used by market research companies to measure quality of retail service or gather specific information about products and services. Mystery shoppers posing as normal customers perform specific tasks—such as purchasing a product, asking questions, registering complaints or behaving in a certain way – and then provide detailed reports or feedback about their experiences.

Mystery shopping was standard practice by the early 1940s as a way to measure employee integrity. Tools used for mystery shopping assessments range from simple questionnaires to complete audio and video recordings. Many mystery shopping companies are completely administered through the Internet, allowing potential mystery shoppers to use the Internet to register for participation, find mystery shopping jobs and receive payment.

The most common venues where mystery shopping is used are retail stores, movie theaters, restaurants, fast food chains, banks, gas stations, car dealerships, apartments and health clubs, as well as health care facilities. In the UK, mystery shopping is increasingly used to provide feedback on customer services provided by local authorities and other non-profit organizations, such as housing associations and churches.

Methodology

When a client company hires a company providing Mystery Shopping services, a survey model will be drawn up and agreed to which defines what information and improvement factors the client company wishes to measure as part of the mystery shopping process. These are then drawn up into survey instruments and assignments that are allocated to shoppers registered with the mystery shopping company in question.

The details and information points shoppers take note of typically include:

Shoppers are often given instructions or procedures to make the transaction atypical to make the test of the knowledge and service skills of the employees more stringent or specific to a particular service issue (known as scenarios). For instance, mystery shoppers at a restaurant may pretend they are lactose-intolerant, or a clothing store mystery shopper could inquire about gift-wrapping services. Not all mystery shopping scenarios include a purchase.

While gathering information, shoppers usually blend in to the store being evaluated as regular shoppers. They may sometimes be required to take photographs or measurements, return purchases, or count the number of products, seats, people during the visit. A timer or a stopwatch may be required. In some states, mystery shoppers must also be licensed as private investigators in order to perform some of the tasks.

From there, the shopper will then submit the data collected to the Mystery shopping company in question. That company then reviews and analyzes this information, completing quantitative or qualitative statistical reports on the data for the client company. This enables measurement against the previously defined criteria.

Statistics

The mystery shopping industry had an estimated value of nearly $600 million in the United States in 2004, according to a 2005 report commissioned by the Mystery Shopping Providers Association (MSPA). Companies that participated in the report experienced an average growth of 11.1 percent from 2003 to 2004, compared to an average growth of 12.2 percent. The report estimates more than 8.1 million mystery shops were conducted in 2004. The report represents the first industry association attempt to quantify the size of the mystery shopping industry. Similar surveys are available for European regions where mystery shopping is becoming more embedded into company procedures.

As a measure of its importance, customer/patient satisfaction is being incorporated more frequently into executive pay. A study by a US firm found more than 55% of hospital chief executive officers surveyed in 2005 had "some compensation at risk," based on patient satisfaction, up from only 8% to 20% a dozen years ago."

CBC Television's news magazine program Marketplace ran a segment on this topic during a January 2001 episode.

Issues

Ethics

In June 2008, the The American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs released a recommendation on the use of "secret shopper patients" in the Medical / Healthcare. The Recommendation: "Physicians have an ethical responsibility to engage in activities that contribute to continual improvements in patient care. One method for promoting such quality improvement is through the use of secret shopper 'patients' who have been appropriately trained to provide feedback about physician performance in the clinical setting."

The most widely used set of professional guidelines and ethics standards for the industry is ISO 20252 ratified in 2006.

Fraud

A scam exists that uses mystery shopping as a premise for fraud, where a person is sent a bad check with a request to deposit it into their bank account, wire a portion of the money through a wire transfer company such as Western Union or MoneyGram and keep the remainder as a mystery shopping fee, and informed to mail the money immediately as the test is evaluating response time. People who wire the "remainder" discover the check is bad and lose the money they transfer and the wire transfer service fee in addition to the total amount of the check, often leaving them in debt to their banks. One scam involved fraudulent websites using a misspelled URL to advertise online and in newspapers under a legitimate company's name.

Valid mystery shopping companies will never send their clients a check to cash prior to work being completed, and their advertisements will usually include a contact person and phone number. Checks received from mystery shopping companies should only be in payment for work performed, and can always be taken to a bank to be verified. Most fraudulent cheques sent out by scam artists can be easily spotted and identified by a financial professional. On February 3, 2009 The Internet Crime Complaint Center issued a warning on this scam.

See also

References

  1. ^ footnote on History of Mystery Shopping
  2. ^ Mystery worshipers test church
  3. ^ Career Knowtes: Mystery Shopping by Kailin Gow
  4. ^ Dees J., Mystery Shoppers: Dispelling The Mystery
  5. ^ Health Care Taps 'Mystery Shoppers' at Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2006
  6. ^ Mystery shopping: Billion dollar industry keeps retailers in check
  7. ^ AMA: Ethical and Judicial Affairs Report (Pages 18-20)
  8. ^ Market, opinion and social research
  9. ^ Giving the Bounce to Counterfeit Check Scams
  10. ^ Residents warned of job ad scam
  11. ^ Internet Crime Complaint Center warning

External links