Frequently asked questions (FAQ's)

How often should I mystery shop a business?

This really depends on what you are looking to get out of the process. For example:
 
If you're looking to use mystery shopping to improve your business this works best if it's used as a motivational tool for your staff. For this to be a success mystery shopping visits need to be frequent enough so that they're always at the back of the staff's mind (say once a month), but also irregular so that staff don't think that once one has been completed there's a few weeks grace before they need to think about it again. So you might want to think about running 12 cycles over a year with varying gaps in between, but occasionally having an extra cycle of activity overlapping another or starting just after one has finished.
 
If you're using mystery shopping to measure how effective your staff training is, then you might choose to mystery shop your business a few times before you deliver your training so you can see where you need to improve, then run some more a couple of weeks after your training to measure how effective it was, and then maybe every 6 weeks after that to ensure that your training is still being applied in practice and to understand at what stage you might want to think about re-training.
 
Or, if you're looking to evaluate the service of one of your competitors to provide a benchmark for your own performance, but you already have a good understanding of the competitors business, you might only want to mystery shop them every 2 or 3 months.