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PRIVATE EYES

MYSTERY SHOPPERS HELP RETAILERS KEEP TABS ON THEIR FAR-FLUNG OPERATIONS

By Molly Knight

Helena Martin works under-cover. On any given morning she will arise to an e-mail containing names, locations and instructions for the day's stakeouts. About an hour later Martin will set out to begin her reconnaissance work in the New York City concrete jungle, on foot. She will spend the next three hours or so surveying perhaps five sites and making some 40 pages of notes.

Martin is not with the CIA. Neither is she working for the police or for any neighborhood watch group. No, Martin, 27, is a mystery shopper. Her job is to secretly evaluate a retailer's stores for customer service, cleanliness, organization and other standards and then report to the head office.

This kind of snooping is a lucrative business for the firms that provide mystery shopping services to retail chains and other consumer-based companies. It is also a vital means by which retailers gather information about how well their stores are operating, says David Rich, president and CEO of ICC Decision Services, a New York City-based mystery shopping firm. According to the Mystery Shopping Providers Association of North America, such companies generated a combined $600 million in revenue in the U.S. last year.

Rich says major retailers use these services because they find it more effective in getting the feedback they need. Generally, customers only contact retailers when they have had a terrible experience. The observations of mystery shoppers, by contrast, are more multifaceted and detailed. “The mystery shopper isn't emotional, she is objective,” said Rich. “This is the best way a retailer can measure where they are and learn what areas are strong and what areas need improvement.”

Martin is, like most mystery shoppers, a freelancer. She spends the rest of her professional time as a photo editor in New York City. She says she has been mystery shopping for about three years, during which she has worked for about 100 companies. Many of them have only a few clients, and she is rarely allowed to shop the same store twice. On a good day, she will have four or five assignments. “More than that can get crazy,” she said. “It gets too hard to remember everything, because, obviously, you can't take notes while you're in the store.”

The pay for this work varies, depending on the assignment and other factors, says Rich. Typically, a shopping excursion will last somewhere between 35 and 45 minutes and requires the mystery shopper to act like any other customer while unobtrusively gathering information. For this, the shopper will earn about $15 or $20 from the firm, plus an additional $7 or $8 from the client chain, toward the purchase of any item in the store.

Not every client is a store, though. If the assignment involves a restaurant, the strategy will call for the mystery shopper to bring along another diner or two, and the payment is the reimbursed meal, Rich says. The pay for a more complex and time-consuming assignment, however, can go as high as $100 an hour, he says. He cites a gym client, for instance, for which the mystery shopper telephoned a few days beforehand to inquire about and begin the membership process and to arrange an appointment. The idea here is to see how well the associates can field questions and to observe the timeliness with which they return phone calls.

On a chilly January afternoon, Martin, accompanied by a reporter, is mystery shopping at a popular clothing store in Lower Manhattan that targets budget-conscious but fashionable 18-to-30-year-old women. (Martin requested that the store not be identified in this article.) She will spend 30 minutes in the store, making mental notes about such things as the friendliness of the staff and the wait times for dressing rooms and on the checkout lines. She is careful to conceal her stopwatch when she times such things, of course, because getting marked would ruin the whole operation. “It's never happened before, but it wouldn't be good,” said Martin. “The point is for me to blend and get the same experience as the average shopper.” Later Martin will complete a seven-page survey about her experience in the store.

Retailers work with mystery shopping firms to construct these questionnaires based on specific goals and expectations. Within 12 hours of the visit, Martin will upload the survey to her employer's Web site, and the firm will then submit the results to the retailer.

This particular retailer's packet consists of six sections. The first is labeled “Entrance-First Impression” and asks: “Were the garments near the front entrance presentable?” and “After five minutes in the store were you acknowledged by a sales associate?” Martin will answer five such questions and then write out a paragraph detailing her initial impressions.

That impression is mixed on this particular visit. Martin is in the store for 35 minutes and not once does a sales clerk approach. In fact, she goes looking for one to request a sweater in a different size and realizes there is none in sight. “I feel bad writing that down, because maybe they are understaffed because someone called in sick,” Martin says. “This isn't supposed to be a punishment thing.” In fact, Martin says roughly half of the comments she makes on these forms are positive. “Staff dressed appropriately” and “sweaters folded neatly” will go in the section titled “Sales Floor,” which asks: “Were associates focused on customers first and others second?” and “Were associates dressed within dress code guidelines?”

Right now, though, Martin happens to be focused on a cement bucket left inexplicably abandoned on the floor in front of a rack of purple, crushed-velvet dresses. “That's a bit strange,” she says. “Otherwise, this store is really clean and organized.”

Rich says he advises retailers to have mystery shoppers visit weekly at their top-tier stores and monthly at the stores that do less volume. “It takes retailers getting results from our mystery shoppers to figure out how to improve sales in a region,” said Rich. “Sometimes it is just a matter of putting extra staff in a fitting room to help bring different sizes and styles to customers. The store may be paying for more workers, but they end up selling more clothes.”

Sometimes when retailers are getting negative feedback from customers regarding their return policies, they have a mystery shopper go through the process of buying and bringing back an item and then reporting the results, Rich says. “The bottom line is mystery shopping objectively measures the customer experience against the company's standards,” said Rich. “What gets measured gets done.”

The final section of the survey, marked “General Information,” asks Martin to give her overall impression of the store and its associates. “Overall, I'd call it a pretty clean store that probably needs more employees,” Martin wrote. Before she can go and upload the information, she must visit four more stores on this particular afternoon.

Apparently, lots of people want to share in that fun. “We get 600 [employment] applications a week,” said Rich. “Most of those people don't know about the kind of work that goes into it, though.” Rich says the majority of these applicants are women between 30 and 50 who would like to get paid to shop. And though each of the estimated 500 mystery shopping firms in the U.S. appreciates employees with a passion for retail, the best of these secret shoppers share many traits with real sleuths, including an eye for detail, an excellent memory and the ability to blend in with the masses.

So how long before the U.S. Department of Labor starts publishing the occupational outlook for mystery shoppers? Or before trade schools begin offering training courses and certificate programs? It may be that shopping is getting just too commercial.