Mystery customer research: cognitive processes affecting accuracy

Carolyn C Preston, Andrew Colman and Lisa J Morrison

Mystery customer research is a technique of quality assessment in the retail sector (where it is called mystery shopping) and also in the service sector.
  

Mystery Customer Research: Cognitive Processes Affecting Accuracy

 

Lisa J. MorrisonBritish Psychological Society and

Andrew M. Colman & Carolyn C. Preston University of Leicester

INTRODUCTION

Mystery customer research, although it is not without its critics (e.g. Brown 1990), is an industry that is currently worth an estimated 10m per annum in the United Kingdom (Miles 1993) and is becoming increasingly popular in the United States (Eisman 1993; Schlossberg 1991), Australia (Dougherty 1987), and elsewhere. One American market research company, Customer Perspectives, spends 95% of its time on mystery customer research (Wolfensberger 1990). In...

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