IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jouret/v95y2019i3p47-62.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do Mystery Shoppers Really Predict Customer Satisfaction and Sales Performance?

Author

Listed:
  • Blessing, Gerald
  • Natter, Martin

Abstract

Mystery shopping (MS) is a widely used tool to monitor the quality of service and personal selling. In consultative retail settings, assessments of mystery shoppers are supposed to capture the most relevant aspects of salespeople’s service and sales behavior. Given the important conclusions drawn by managers from MS results, the standard assumption seems to be that assessments of mystery shoppers are strongly related to customer satisfaction and sales performance. However, surprisingly scant empirical evidence supports this assumption. We test the relationship between MS assessments and customer evaluations and sales performance with large-scale data from three service retail chains. Surprisingly, we do not find a substantial correlation. The results show that mystery shoppers are not good proxies for real customers. While MS assessments are not related to sales, our findings confirm the established correlation between customer satisfaction measurements and sales results.

Suggested Citation

  • Blessing, Gerald & Natter, Martin, 2019. "Do Mystery Shoppers Really Predict Customer Satisfaction and Sales Performance?," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 95(3), pages 47-62.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jouret:v:95:y:2019:i:3:p:47-62
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jretai.2019.04.001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022435919300211
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jretai.2019.04.001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Brexendorf, Tim Oliver & Mühlmeier, Silke & Tomczak, Torsten & Eisend, Martin, 2010. "The impact of sales encounters on brand loyalty," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 63(11), pages 1148-1155, November.
    2. Hunneman, Auke & Verhoef, Peter C. & Sloot, Laurens M., 2015. "The Impact of Consumer Confidence on Store Satisfaction and Share of Wallet Formation," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 91(3), pages 516-532.
    3. de Haan, Evert & Verhoef, Peter C. & Wiesel, Thorsten, 2015. "The predictive ability of different customer feedback metrics for retention," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 195-206.
    4. Alan M. Wilson, 1998. "The Use of Mystery Shopping in the Measurement of Service Delivery," The Service Industries Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(3), pages 148-163, July.
    5. Ailawadi, Kusum L. & Neslin, Scott A. & Luan, Y. Jackie & Taylor, Gail Ayala, 2014. "Does retailer CSR enhance behavioral loyalty? A case for benefit segmentation," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 156-167.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Block, Sidney T. & Friebel, Guido & Heinz, Matthias & Zubanov, Nick, 2022. "Mystery Shopping as a Strategic Management Practice in Multi-Site Firms," IZA Discussion Papers 15599, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Marder, Ben & Angell, Rob & Boyd, Eric, 2023. "How and why (imagined) online reviews impact frontline retail encounters," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 99(2), pages 265-279.
    3. Agag, Gomaa & Durrani, Baseer Ali & Shehawy, Yasser Moustafa & Alharthi, Majed & Alamoudi, Hawazen & El-Halaby, Sherif & Hassanein, Ahmed & Abdelmoety, Ziad H., 2023. "Understanding the link between customer feedback metrics and firm performance," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 73(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. María Lourdes Arco-Castro & María Victoria Lopez-Pérez & Sara Rodriguez-Gomez & Raquel Garde-Sánchez, 2020. "Do Stakeholders Modulate Philanthropic Strategy? Corporate Philanthropy as Stakeholders’ Engagement," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(18), pages 1-18, September.
    2. Block, Sidney T. & Friebel, Guido & Heinz, Matthias & Zubanov, Nick, 2022. "Mystery Shopping as a Strategic Management Practice in Multi-Site Firms," IZA Discussion Papers 15599, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    3. Peter C. Verhoef & Martin Heijnsbroek & Joost Bosma, 2017. "Developing A Service Improvement System for the National Dutch Railways," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 47(6), pages 489-504, December.
    4. Sunghun Chung & Donghyuk Shin & Jooyoung Park, 2022. "Predicting Firm Market Performance Using the Social Media Promoter Score," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 33(4), pages 545-561, December.
    5. Muhammad Mubushar & Shahid Rasool & Muhammad Imtiaz Haider & Roberto Cerchione, 2021. "The impact of corporate social responsibility activities on stakeholders' value co‐creation behaviour," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 28(6), pages 1906-1920, November.
    6. Hunneman, Auke & Verhoef, Peter C. & Sloot, Laurens M., 2021. "The impact of hard discounter presence on store satisfaction and store loyalty," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 59(C).
    7. Kocaman, Barış & Gelper, Sarah & Langerak, Fred, 2023. "Till the cloud do us part: Technological disruption and brand retention in the enterprise software industry," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 40(2), pages 316-341.
    8. Jenni Sipilä & Sascha Alavi & Laura Marie Edinger-Schons & Sabrina Dörfer & Christian Schmitz, 2021. "Corporate social responsibility in luxury contexts: potential pitfalls and how to overcome them," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 49(2), pages 280-303, March.
    9. Hampson, Daniel P. & Gong, Shiyang & Xie, Yi, 2021. "How consumer confidence affects price conscious behavior: The roles of financial vulnerability and locus of control," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 132(C), pages 693-704.
    10. Anat Toder‐Alon & Eyal Rosenstreich & Tali Te'eni Harari, 2019. "Give or take? Consumers' ambivalent perspectives on the relationship between a firm's corporate social responsibility engagement and its responsible tax payments," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 26(4), pages 872-884, July.
    11. Percy Marquina & Vincent Charles, 2021. "A Bayesian resampling approach to estimate the difference in effect sizes in consumer social responses to CSR initiatives versus corporate abilities," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 28(6), pages 1680-1699, November.
    12. Seong Ho Lee, 2021. "Effects of Retailers’ Corporate Social Responsibility on Retailer Equity and Consumer Usage Intention," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(6), pages 1-9, March.
    13. Stanisavljević Milena, 2017. "Does Customer Loyalty Depend on Corporate Social Responsibility?," Naše gospodarstvo/Our economy, Sciendo, vol. 63(1), pages 38-46, March.
    14. Sven Baehre & Michele O’Dwyer & Lisa O’Malley & Nick Lee, 2022. "The use of Net Promoter Score (NPS) to predict sales growth: insights from an empirical investigation," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 50(1), pages 67-84, January.
    15. Ghanbarpour, Tohid & Gustafsson, Anders, 2022. "How do corporate social responsibility (CSR) and innovativeness increase financial gains? A customer perspective analysis," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 471-481.
    16. Hafiz Muhammad Naveed & Yao Hongxing & Muhammad Akhtar & Muhammad Usman Anwer & David Alemzero, 2020. "The Impact of Customer Feedback on Organizational Health when Employee Empowerment works as a moderator: Evidence from Pakistani Fast Food Industry," Business and Economic Research, Macrothink Institute, vol. 10(3), pages 65-89, September.
    17. Menno D. T. Jong & Mark Meer, 2017. "How Does It Fit? Exploring the Congruence Between Organizations and Their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Activities," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 143(1), pages 71-83, June.
    18. Dongsheng Zhang & Hongwei Wang & Xiangshan Jin, 2022. "Element Matching and Configuration Path of Corporate Social Responsibility Performance," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(11), pages 1-18, May.
    19. Julián Chaparro-Peláez & Emiliano Acquila-Natale & Ángel Hernández-García & Santiago Iglesias-Pradas, 2020. "The Digital Transformation of the Retail Electricity Market in Spain," Energies, MDPI, vol. 13(8), pages 1-18, April.
    20. Ho, Ly & Bai, Min & Lu, Yue & Qin, Yafeng, 2021. "The effect of corporate sustainability performance on leverage adjustments," The British Accounting Review, Elsevier, vol. 53(5).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jouret:v:95:y:2019:i:3:p:47-62. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-retailing .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.