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The Mystery Shopping Providers Association (MSPA) is dedicated to improving service and promoting excellence in the mystery shopping industry. A fundamental aim of the Association is to ensure that standards are maintained. To improve the value, reputation and to stimulate the use of mystery shopping services, it is important that information about mystery shopping services is accurately communicated to both the business community and the public at large, whilst complying with applicable government laws, regulations and ordinances.

These Standards should be read in conjunction with the MSPA Ethics Code and be applied in relation to the relevant National laws and regulations of the country of operation. The main aim of these Standards is to promote professionalism in the conduct of mystery shopping, to ensure quality for customers and consistency amongst MSPA members.


All MSPA Standards are mandatory, binding on members and any sub-contractors employed or used by members, where the Standards indicate that actions or procedures shall or must be adhered to by members. Breaches of these conditions will be treated as breaches of the Ethics Code and may be subject to disciplinary action, including potential exclusion from membership of the MSPA Europe, as stated in the Ethics Code.

Advisable - these are the recommendations within the Standards that illustrate how members should behave. They are specified and distinguished as such.


For more information about the Standards, please contact a member of the MSPA Europe Board.


Definition of Mystery Shopping

Mystery shopping can be defined as:

The use of individuals trained/briefed to experience and measure any customer service process, by acting as potential customers / actual customers and in some way reporting back on their experiences in a detailed and objective way.

Mystery Shopping is above all a tool to assess the quality of service, organisation and management, rather than a market research technique. Mystery shopping generally reviews how staff perform against pre-determined standards during an interaction where the staff are engaged.



Ethical Principles

The objective of a mystery shopping project should be to provide management information on processes and/or quality of service in order to aid retraining plans, improvements in service and hence increase customer satisfaction, advocacy and loyalty. Such projects must not be used as a reason for dismissals and reprimands.

Any agency undertaking such work must ensure that their client is aware of the provisions made in these Standards and get agreement that both parties accept them as the basis for the project.

Advisory - Therefore it is recommended that the Standards be attached to proposals and contracts, or provided via a link to the corresponding section of the MSPA Europe website.

All work must be conducted within the law (social, tax, data protection etc) of the country where the fieldwork is being conducted, wherever the country of origin of the agency is. (See ‘Legal Issues’ section).




Technical Principles

Scope:
There is no universal requirement with mystery shopping to have a minimum sample size that is representative of the entire population. In this respect Mystery Shopping differs from Market Research where a more formal requirement to create a truly representative sample exists.

Mystery Shopping results reflect client objective experiences. Therefore the scope must particularly reflect variety of conditions of client experiences, but might not be strictly representative of the universe.

Advisory - To provide a wider picture of the customer experience, a clients estate should be mystery shopped multiple times. If possible, mystery shops should be conducted at different times of the day and/or week to ensure coverage of different trading conditions. In addition samples should take into consideration geographic location and population and location size and formats.

The validity of any study depends on the design and execution of the scenarios used. These should be:
relevant
credible
ethical
practical
safe for the mystery shoppers
and objective.

To be relevant, the scenario must be designed to test the specific sales, service or operational behaviour that is the topic of study. The scenario should consider the training or instruction that staff have been given on how to deal with a situation so that, when delivered credibly, staff should deliver the desired behaviour. The study can then test the extent to which this is the case.

To be credible, the scenario should be realistic, in that it represents natural consumer behaviour in the market concerned and can be enacted convincingly by the mystery shopper. While mystery shoppers must be thoroughly briefed, they must not appear too slick or over-rehearsed. Overly sophisticated scenarios can result in the staff guessing that the mystery shopper is not a real customer, compromising the value of the study. As a general rule, the scenario itself should be straightforward, so the mystery shopper can easily understand and apply it, with the detailed briefing focusing on how to handle follow-up questions, so providing convincing ‘depth’ to the role. In addition, mystery shoppers should fit the profile of appropriate purchasers, and have a level of familiarity with the product field that is appropriate to the scenario that they are required to follow.

To be ethical, the client’s own staff must have been advised that their performance may be checked from time to time through mystery shopping. Where regulatory bodies or sub-contractors intend to use such projects to examine service levels provided, they must ensure that the contacted party understands that this method of appraisal will be used, and advise its staff accordingly. This could be in the form of a newsletter, on the company website or by any other managerial means. With competitor organisations such assurances cannot be made but the competitor staff or organisation must not suffer any detrimental effect (see section 1.2) as a result of a mystery shopping research exercise.

To be practical from the evaluation viewpoint, simplicity, brevity, and keeping the assignment appropriate ensures experiences are correctly reported. It should be borne in mind that mystery shoppers have to remember their answers until they are out of sight of staff, and the assessment should therefore be realistic in length and complexity to allow for this fact.

Scenarios used for mystery shopping must be safe in that the mystery shoppers must not be asked to do anything illegal or that puts them under any physical risk (e.g. locality, disability, gender, ethnicity). Care must be taken to protect mystery shoppers from any adverse implications of carrying out an evaluation (e.g. personal safety, effect on credit references).

The questionnaire that the mystery shopper completes should be focused on objective questions, with the majority aimed at gathering factual information. The primary aim should be to document precisely what happened at the point of contact, rather than how the mystery shopper feels. Objectivity will also help ensure consistency across all of the evaluations conducted. However, some subjective ratings, such as the perceived confidence of staff and the mystery shoppers overall satisfaction with the way their enquiry was handled, may be included and can be useful when interpreting the results. It is recommended however that any subjective questions are clearly defined, remain limited in number, and that the client is made aware of the limits of all the subjective elements within the questionnaire and subsequent results.

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