"There is no alternative to mystery shopping when it comes to measuring the service quality," says the economics professor Norbert Drees from the UAS Erfurt. In his opinion, service is becoming more and more important became many products from various manufacturers are in the meantime interchangeable. But how can one distinguish between good and bad service? A realistic appraisal can be obtained only from the customer's perspective: during mystery shopping, qualified testers pretend to be customers and obtain specific information about the perception of a company's management from the customer's viewpoint. The advantage over conventional customer surveys as frequently conducted using questionnaires and telephone interviews: significantly more detailed analyses about service processes are possible. When they are professionally well prepared, the testers do not overlook whether the employees have actually asked for important information such as a telephone number which is used to call back and confirm the appointment. True customers rarely remember such details. Their recall is usually dominated only by a good or poor impression which can rarely be explained precisely and can almost never be analyzed according to specific details.

Wake-up call for weaknesses
Fundamentally, mystery shopping can be used in various ways. To start with, it serves as an important instrument for continuous quality management. Usually it is supposed to monitor and improve customer care processes on a permanent basis. Moreover, this test method is extraordinarily suitable for providing an early "wake-up call": based on real and concrete examples in the necessary sample size, it demonstrates, for example, that the quality of the consulting services has dramatically worsened after the sixth new product launch in the same quarter. The excuse of the unfortunate special case which people love to use does not hold up. Mystery shopping does not aim so much at preventing isolated customer dramas as it seeks to raise the level of process quality in general and lastingly. But mystery shopping does not serve only as a sensor to root out own weaknesses; it can be used with respect to the competition to make comparisons with the competition in everyday situations, at intervals or continuously, on the basis of benchmarks. It is a tool which can also be applied as a one-off procedure for innovative business models to obtain a reality check for a new business idea.