It’s one of the questions we’re asked most often by clients: “Who are your mystery shoppers?” It’s a great question—after all, these are the people who’ll be experiencing your business and providing the insights you need to improve and excel.
So, let’s introduce you to our mystery shoppers and explain how we ensure you get the highest quality feedback from people who are genuinely credible and professional.
Where Do They Come From?
It’s a real mixture! Our mystery shoppers come from all walks of life and bring diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Many have had careers across all sorts of industries—retail, hospitality, finance, healthcare, IT, marketing, education, you name it. This breadth of experience means that we have shoppers who understand different business environments and can provide informed, contextual feedback.
Many are professionals or ex-professionals. Some are semi-retired or fully retired, bringing decades of business experience and a keen eye for quality service.
Many of our shoppers are part of the wider mystery shopping community. These people are usually registered with multiple companies (this is especially true of video mystery shoppers, of which there are only a limited number in the UK). They’re experienced, reliable, and take the work seriously.
We’ve even had clients and their family members become mystery shoppers for us—people who’ve seen the value of mystery shopping firsthand and wanted to be part of it!
What Do They Look Like? Profiles? Demographics?
Our shoppers represent a genuine cross-section of the UK population.
There’s a slight bias towards middle-aged shoppers within mystery shopping as a whole, though we have shoppers of all ages, from 18 to over 80. There’s also a slight bias towards female shoppers, although we have plenty of male shoppers too.
This diversity is actually one of our strengths—it means we can match shoppers to your specific customer demographics and ensure the feedback you receive reflects your real customer base.
How Do We Find and Recruit Them?
People discover mystery shopping through all sorts of routes. After all, Mystery Shopping has been around for over 100 years! Many people have engaged with it at different periods in their lives, and many have been exposed to it through their own work.
Those looking to get into mystery shopping typically join online communities (such as on Facebook) where they can get information, updates, and tips. These communities help them understand what sorts of assignments are available and which companies are good to work with. We’re pleased to say we have a great reputation in these groups!
But we don’t just wait for shoppers to come to us. We proactively recruit people as needed for different assignments—different locations, ages, backgrounds, and characteristics. When we don’t have someone suitable already in our database, we’re very skilled at proactive shopper recruitment.
We’ll reach out via online communities, special interest groups, and relevant pages. We post invitations and notices, or directly message people who seem like a good fit. We’re very experienced at performing successful cold outreach to find the right people for specific assignments.
For B2B enquiries, we even proactively recruit (headhunt, using cold outreach) professionals in specialist industries. This ensures our B2B mystery shoppers have genuine credibility and domain knowledge when engaging with your competitors or testing your own sales processes.
How Do We Test and Train Them?
Quality control starts from day one.
With new shoppers, we have some basic competency tests that we ask them to undertake. We also normally begin by having them conduct simpler, more straightforward assignments. Over time, as they demonstrate their capability, they move on to more demanding assignments.
Every assignment a shopper completes is marked and scored against different criteria. This means we build up a detailed picture of each shopper’s performance across different areas and aspects. This informs us about their development and focus areas, and helps us understand what assignments each shopper is suitable for or ready to take on.
Where required by the client or the type of assignment, we carry out more rigorous checks—DBS checks, for example—to ensure complete peace of mind.
How Do We Ensure Quality Output?
Getting great feedback isn’t just about finding the right people—it’s about how we work with them. Here’s how we ensure you get the highest quality output:
Crystal Clear Briefs: We provide shoppers with detailed, clear briefs based on thorough conversations with our clients about what needs to happen in each interaction. There’s no ambiguity—shoppers know exactly what’s expected.
Direct 1:1 Briefing and Coaching: Generally speaking, every time a shopper works on a new assignment, they receive direct one-to-one briefing and coaching from our team members. This ensures a much higher quality of interaction than the method used by other companies, where shoppers simply receive written instructions (which aren’t always perfectly clear) through a portal.
Ongoing Performance Tracking: Because we score every assignment, we know each shopper’s strengths and can match them to assignments where they’ll excel.
Quality Over Everything: If a shopper makes a mistake or a brief isn’t met, the quality of output for our clients is paramount. We work with the shopper to help them rectify the situation and ensure you get the feedback you need. If it’s ever necessary, we start again with another shopper, and give constructive feedback to any shoppers if and where they failed to meet a brief. We’re always fair and reasonable with our shoppers…
How Do We Treat Our Mystery Shoppers?
Our relationships with our shoppers—of all types, young or old, new or experienced, specialist or general—are one of our greatest assets and essential to our success. We put a lot of work and focus into building and maintaining these relationships.
Here’s how we treat our mystery shoppers:
With Respect, Clarity, and Fairness: We value our shoppers and treat them with the respect they deserve.
We Build Ongoing Relationships: We’re not transactional. We invest in long-term relationships with our shoppers, which means they’re committed to delivering quality work for us and our clients.
We Pay Them Well: Quality work deserves fair compensation. We ensure our shoppers are paid well for their expertise and effort. Our fees are considerably higher than industry averages, and always in line with or higher than the Real Living Wage.
We Provide Support: Through detailed briefings, coaching, and ongoing communication, we ensure shoppers feel supported and confident in every assignment.
This approach creates a virtuous cycle: we treat our shoppers well, they deliver excellent work, our clients get reliable insights, and everyone benefits.
The Bottom Line
Our mystery shoppers are real people with genuine backgrounds, diverse experiences, and professional standards. They treat their work seriously, prepare for their assignments and come across as credible customers helping provide authentic feedback by engaging in on-brief interactions that are as realistic as possible.
More importantly, we don’t just recruit them and hope for the best. We test, train, brief, and individually track their performance, building ongoing relationships with them. This ensures that when a mystery shopper engages with your business, you get feedback that’s accurate, detailed, and genuinely valuable.
That’s how we ensure quality output—and that’s why our clients trust the insights we provide.
A Note About B2B Mystery Shopping
This page focuses primarily on our mystery shoppers for B2C clients. For information about B2B mystery shopping and the specialist professionals we recruit for those enquiries, please see our B2B Mystery Shopping page.
Want to Know More?
If you’d like to discuss how our mystery shoppers could help you gain valuable insights into your business, we’d be pleased to chat.
Schedule a discovery call or call us on 01392 984224 to discuss how mystery shopping could work for your business.