Mystery shopping and customer experience glossary

Mystery shopping terms

Mystery shopping

A research method in which trained evaluators interact with a business as ordinary customers and report on the experience against defined service standards.

Mystery shopper

A trained person who carries out mystery shopping assignments. Also called an evaluator, secret shopper or mystery customer.

Scenario

The script or situation an evaluator follows during an assignment, such as a family buying a car or a tourist booking a hotel room.

Questionnaire

The structured list of questions and scoring criteria an evaluator completes after the assignment.

Evaluation

One completed mystery shopping assignment and its report.

Wave or cycle

A round of evaluations across all agreed locations within a set period, usually a month or a quarter.

Competitor shopping

Running the same scenario at competitors to compare performance like for like.

Retail audit

An on-site inspection of store execution, such as merchandising, pricing, promotions and cleanliness.

Brand compliance audit

An inspection that checks whether a location follows the brand's visual, behavioural and operational standards.

Lead handling audit

A test of how quickly and how well a business responds to and follows up on sales enquiries.

Calibration

The process of aligning scoring between evaluators and reviewers so that results are consistent and fair.

Customer experience terms

Customer experience (CX)

The sum of every interaction a customer has with a brand, and how the customer feels about those interactions.

Customer journey

The sequence of steps a customer goes through, from awareness and enquiry to purchase, service and loyalty.

Touchpoint

Any point where a customer interacts with a brand, such as a store, website, phone call or WhatsApp message.

Moment of truth

A touchpoint that has a disproportionate effect on how the customer judges the whole experience.

CSAT

Customer Satisfaction Score: a measure of satisfaction with a specific interaction, usually on a 1 to 5 scale.

NPS

Net Promoter Score: the percentage of customers who would recommend the brand minus the percentage who would not.

CES

Customer Effort Score: a measure of how easy it was for the customer to get something done.

Voice of Customer (VoC)

A programme that collects and analyses customer feedback from all channels and turns it into action.

Service recovery

The actions a business takes to put things right after a service failure.

First-contact resolution

The share of customer issues resolved in the first interaction, without the customer needing to call or visit again.

Operations and reporting terms

SOP

Standard Operating Procedure: a documented way of carrying out a task consistently.

SLA

Service Level Agreement: an agreed standard for response or resolution time, such as replying to every lead within 15 minutes.

Lead response time

The time between a customer's enquiry and the first meaningful response from the business.

Composite CX score

A single score that combines several weighted measures of the customer experience.

Benchmarking

Comparing performance against internal targets, other branches or competitors.

Corrective action

A specific, assigned action to fix a gap found during an evaluation.

Clienteling

A luxury retail practice of building long-term personal relationships with individual clients.

Omnichannel

An approach in which all channels work together so the customer experiences one consistent brand.