Finishing time：2015/10/8 16:00:31 Announcer：TRISEARCHER
In China, mystery shopping is still a new concept to the public. However, with increasing more multinational enterprises have introduced and adopted this service, the mystery shopping industry is springing up in China.
Within a few years, mystery shopping is widely adopted and developing at a fast pace. An increasing more service enterprises, such as restaurants, hotels, retail terminals of durable consumer goods and fast moving consuming goods, after-sale centers and IT call centers, have employed this method to evaluate its own service level. Chinese companies and institutions, such as China Mobile, Haier, Lenovo and China Construction Bank have also adopted mystery shopping a couple of years ago. With today’s deepening development of service marketing, government, enterprises and institutions attach more and more importance to service dynamic monitoring and management, from traditional tangible products to intangible services, from businesses of telecom, power supply, banking, business hall to 4S stores, and even to government service and regional investment environment.
With the increasing of domestic mystery shopping projects, clients nowadays raise increasingly more diversified requirements. However, there are huge problems—in fields of basic theories, mystery shopper training, operation, and research techniques--existed in Chinese mystery shopping industry, which leads to irregular service, clients price squeeze, and the unhealthy and unsound development of the whole industry.
Potential Problem No.1:
From the 1990s, mystery shopping is recognized by the public. However, up to now, the industry in China is still not independent and normative. There are no companies specialized in mystery shopping. The projects are always outsourced to market research companies, whose network is based on research, and without standardized mystery shopper recruitment, training, control and evaluation system. All of the above leads to the unsound industry development.
Meanwhile, clients have no clear knowledge and understanding of mystery shopping and market research, which results in the client dissatisfaction of. And clients attach too much importance to price squeeze.
Potential Problem No.2：
In China, there’re quite a number of companies have realized the advantageous effect brought by mystery shopping, but they share some one-sided understanding that mystery shopper visit is equal to “secret investigation”, and made inadequate preparation or arranged the mystery shoppers on their own in short notice without proper recruitment, training, work quality control and evaluation system; some only focus on price squeeze of the third party service provider company and are indifferent about the scheme or strength of respective vendors but only treat the cost as their top one concern, which led to the unprofessional, nonobjective research result, and caused the unsound development of mystery shopping industry.
Potential Problem No.3：
Mystery shopping industry in China lack in-depth theoretical research and practical operation without proper theories as guidance. As a result, the whole industry is now “groping” in the dark. In contrast, the development of abroad “mystery shopping research” is comparatively mature, but we haven’t introduced its proven techniques, theories and practice, which results in the distortion of the purpose of mystery shopping and make it based on clients’ standard, such as “price-oriented” or “ irregularity-oriented”. The effective method that’s used for service quality improvement has been degraded in a “mechanical” way to form-filling, summary of information, staff rewards and penalty. “Mystery shopping research” lost its value due to the status quo.
Potential Problem No.4：
For mystery shopper recruitment of large project, market research companies always lack specialized mystery shopper network. They only rely on the market research network, or recruit at liberty. With the so-called “short-term training”, mystery shoppers are “unstandardized, not aware of regulation, lack of training , professionalism and fairness”, which makes the final result dubious of its objectivity and fairness. Without professional training, the recruited mystery shoppers will be unable to discover and analyze problems Without professional training, the recruited mystery customers will be unable to discover and analyze problems properly, make no distinction between the major test indicators and the minor ones, confuse of execution processes, identity exposure rate is comparatively high, all of which result in the quality declination and unable to meet clients’ requirements. The vicious cycle of “client price squeeze” – “quality deterioration” – “re-price-squeeze due to clients’ dissatisfaction” is thus formed.
Potential Problem No.5：
The domestic industry `entry barrier of mystery shopper is quite low. Presently, there’s no standard or restriction when market research companies recruit mystery shoppers. Under most circumstance when the client’s requirement is urgent, almost all applicants will be hired. Many of them lack relevant professional background, and it’s even harder to guarantee their personal quality, professional ethics, research techniques, communication skill, and the most important objectiveness and fairness. The lack of qualified mystery shoppers and the non-guaranteed overall quality lead to the disappointment of many clients towards the current industry status and the aversion and resistance of the staffs being tested.
