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Mystery shopping in Iași — how your customers are actually served

An anonymous evaluator walks into your location like any other customer, follows a scenario agreed in advance and writes down what happened. You receive the observations themselves, not just a score.

What mystery shopping is, and who it is for

Mystery shopping is a simulated purchase visit: someone unknown at the location walks in, works through a scenario agreed with you and fills in an evaluation form immediately afterwards. The point is not to catch anyone out, but to show you what a first-time customer sees.

A sales report tells you how much was sold. A mystery shopping visit tells you why: whether anyone was at the shelf, whether the product recommended was yours or a competitor's, whether the promotion advertised at the entrance was still valid at the till.

Advance Service Advertising runs these evaluations for networks with several locations, where the difference between stores only becomes visible if someone walks all of them against the same criteria, in the same period.

How a mystery shopping evaluation runs

The procedure is the same for one location and for twenty. What changes is the number of visits and the way the results are compared.

  1. Step 1

    Scenario and criteria

    We agree what is being evaluated — the greeting, waiting time, the recommendation, cleanliness, adherence to procedure, closing the sale — and write the visit scenario. The evaluation form is built from those criteria, so answers stay comparable across locations.

  2. Step 2

    Selecting the evaluators

    We choose evaluators who match the location's customer profile and are not known there. Each is briefed on the scenario and the form before the first visit, so nobody improvises in store.

  3. Step 3

    Day-labour paperwork

    Where evaluators work as day labourers, the formalities are completed before the first visit: the entry in the day-labour register, the payment agreement, the GDPR notice and the health-and-safety briefing.

  4. Step 4

    The visits

    Visits happen in the agreed windows, including at busy hours if that is what you want to see. The form is filled in immediately after leaving the location, while the detail is fresh. Photo evidence is only taken where it is permitted and only within the law.

  5. Step 5

    Checking and reporting

    Forms are checked for consistency before they reach you. You receive each evaluator's written observations and the comparison across locations for every criterion, so you can see where the problem is a person and where it is a procedure.

Frequently asked questions

Do employees have to be told they will be evaluated?

Your policy on evaluating employees belongs to your internal rules, so that decision is not ours to make. What is ours is to evaluate the service against written criteria rather than people against impressions, and not to collect personal data unrelated to the scenario.

Can photographs be taken inside the location?

Only where it is allowed. Many chains forbid photography in store. Where it is allowed, we photograph the product and the space, not the people. Where photo evidence is not possible, the written observation stands, with the date and time of the visit.

How many visits does it take for the result to mean anything?

One visit shows a day, not a norm. The number of visits per location depends on what you want to see — checking a new procedure is not the same as covering a whole season — and we propose it in the quote, after the conversation about criteria.

Do we only get a score?

No. A score is useful for comparing locations against each other, but on its own it hides the cause. That is why the report also keeps each evaluator's written observations, in their own words.

See your locations through a customer's eyes

Tell us how many locations you have and what you want checked. We will propose the criteria, the scenario and the number of visits.

Request a quote

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