Do you ever wonder about how clients decide on the questions that appear on mystery shop reports? In theory, mystery shopping measures what is most important to the business. However, if care is not taken in the design of the shop report, the information the client gets (and the message they send to employees about what matters) will be way off base.
A few years ago, Office Depot hired a new CEO. He immediately noticed that sales were declining although scores on mystery shop reports were incredibly high. What is wrong with this picture? It turns out that the mystery shopping program was measuring the wrong things. According to CEO Kevin Peters, “Our mystery-shopping scores were correct, but our scoring system was not. We were asking the wrong questions.” The report was full of questions about whether the floors and restrooms were clean, and if the shelves were fully stocked. They were doing great at those things, but no one was taking care of the customers.
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