Local companies have no idea what a “mystery shopper” is

Many agencies that offer the “mystery shopping” service in Bulgaria have reached the conclusion that, to most Bulgarian companies, the “mystery shopping” marketing research method is still unknown. In the past 3 years “mystery shopping” has been a practice in Bulgaria and yet, nowadays, merely 100 companies use it, while the potential for this type of research in our country is around 500-800 companies.

Worldwide, the “mystery shopping” industry is more strongly developed. The emergence of the Internet during the 90’s has accelerated the development of the technology of “mystery shopping” and it is perceived more easily as an applicable practice by all industries.

What is “mystery shopping”? The inspection is carried out by a particular “mystery shopper”, who is comparable to the profile of the potential customers of a company. He or she anonymously evaluates the quality of service, the activity of the staff, the merchandising and product quality, by marking his or her observations in a special questionnaire.

Among the leading companies in this sphere is Client X. It was created in 2005 and remains the only company which uses special “mystery shopping” software. There are various technological methods to support the “mystery shopping” service – standard face-to-face visits, phone calls, email checks, complaints management, competition monitoring, price audit, video-, audio- and photo-recording, and benchmarking.

You can find more information on the most popular reasons for anonymous audit use, the techniques and methods used in “mystery shopping”, and the most frequent violations in Diana Yosifova's article in Klassa Daily Local companies have no idea what a "mystery shopper" is (in Bulgarian).