Shopping mysteriously

This was not just another relaxing trip to the mall for 33-year-old Kiki Dimara. He was on a mission.

He entered the branded boutique with a mental list of what to do, what to ask and what to look for. None of the items on his list had much to do with the product he was pretending to look for, but more with the way he would be treated as a customer.

"I felt sort of like a spy," Kiki recalled. "I mean, here I was pretending to be just another customer while in fact I was evaluating each and every detail *of the customer service interaction*, especially how the sales person responded to her customers."

That half an hour Kiki was no ordinary mall-goer, but a mystery shopper.

Despite what the name of the profession suggests, the world of mystery shopping is not at all James Bond stuff. It's strictly business, mixed with a little bit of fun every now and then, depending on how much one is passionate about shopping and service.

"At first, I feel guilty of having to judge a sales person's performance based on a visit," said the former English teacher who now works full time as a mystery shopper for Canadian-based company Frontline Focus International.

"What if that person is just having a bad day and fails to serve me politely?"

But, in the era of ever-tighter competition between retail businesses, what will make one stand out from the rest is not merely the product, but the service. Well, who would want to come back to a shop or restaurant when treated horribly?

Mystery shopping, which originally emerged during the 1940s in Western retail businesses, has since been a way of assuring that one's brand image isn't affected by sub-standard customer service. In Indonesia, mystery shoppers have only started weaving the corridors of our beloved malls in the last couple of years.

In the past, companies used to do it in-house, but as their business expanded, the job of conducting on-the-spot service checks started to be outsourced to mystery shoppers.

What a mystery shopper like Kiki does is basically spend between 20 minutes to two hours on a designated branch of a department store, a boutique, a restaurant or just about any business in need of a service check.

"I was given a guideline of what details I should notice on that particular visit. Is the sales person friendly? Does the window display look neat? It depends on what aspect the company wants to evaluate," Kiki explained.

Sounds simple and basically everyone shops at least once in their lifetime, right? Everyone can surely do it.

Not really.

"A mystery shopper must be one who is detail oriented and in a way a good actor," said Liz Tanida from Mystery Shopping Indonesia. "It's a whole different experience compared to our usual shopping session.

"In just a glance, one must be able to observe all the aspects to be evaluated according to a certain guideline. And you have to go unnoticed while doing it," she highlighted. Liz, herself, has been a mystery shopper since 1999 before she set up her business in 2007.

She's seen all kinds of responses from shop assistants, from those who are passionate about doing their jobs to those who give condescending looks to customers when they decide not to make a purchase.

"That's what a mystery shopper should look for and note. Is a shop assistant knowledgeable enough about the product? Do they simply give up when we said no to something or do they offer an alternative?"

That's what distinguishes us, regular shoppers, from what Liz calls an "experienced mystery shopper." The experienced ones are the ones who do their job with passion, she added.

"Going unnoticed is the hardest part, especially if you're doing it for the first time. There's always the worry that the shop assistants will recognize you and you won't be able to get the real picture of the everyday service they give," Kiki said.

But, still those challenges haven't prevented more and more people from wanting to do the job, either out of passion for shopping and for purely financial reasons.

Since it opened shop - so to speak - two years ago, Frontline Focus has built a list of 700 part-time mystery shoppers on its database, while Mystery Shopping Indonesia keeps around 300 names ready for various service checks when needed.

And you have hit bull's eye if you guessed most of them are female. Aged mostly between 25 and 40 years old, women make up more than 60 percent of those taking part-time jobs as mystery shoppers.

Perhaps by nature women are more detail-oriented and able to multitask. Not to mention women love to shop. Spending half an hour a day at the mall for extra income doesn't hurt, does it?

Depending on how detailed the observation report has to be, a mystery shopper receives between Rp 50,000 to Rp 5 million for each visit. The last one involves a service check where one must submit a video recording of the visit.

"In some cases, the business owners want to have proof that certain employees are misbehaving, or giving discounts when they shouldn't," said Imelda Tanoyo of Customer Excellence, a company specializing in mystery shopping since 2005.

How does one become a mystery shopper anyway? Where does one start?

Going online is perhaps the best way these days as companies usually do their recruitment on their websites and through word of mouth.

"We do everything through the Internet. From advertising vacancies to sending out guidelines for the job," Imelda explained. "Reports are also submitted by email. That's why we require our mystery shoppers to be able to go online at any time."

So, if you're accepted for a mystery-shopping project, can you basically do it at any time of your convenience, play the role of any type of customer you want, write up everything in the report and submit it?

"There are always guidelines and scenarios for each mystery shopper. And basically, one should not be subjective when writing the report," Liz explained.

Being a mystery shopper doesn't mean one has a license to test the shop assistants' patience and push them to their limit. No yelling and complaining on the spot, that's the basic rule of mystery shopping, leave it for the report.

And the word "mystery" in the label of the profession should be kept in mind. It means asking a friend to join you on a mission is a big no-no, unless you have specifically been asked to do so.

"Sometimes, we send three mystery shoppers to the same shop without them knowing about each other," Liz said.

And don't think that the world of mystery shopping revolves only around entering boutiques and restaurants. These days, any kinds of businesses - from banks, private schools to hospitals - are embarking on this secret way of evaluating their employees' performance.

"I once did checks for the real estate business," said Amanda, another mystery shopper. "I went to the site and pretend to be interested in buying one of the units."

And just like mystery shopping for stores and restaurants, Amanda noted all her complaints in her mind and her then into her report. Even if sometimes she just felt like complaining to a sales person who answered her questions indifferently.

"On one occasion, I asked whether there was a market nearby and the answer was *I don't know, I don't live here.' You just have to remain calm in such cases," she said.

But, bad days tend to be few and far between for a mystery shopper. Most of the time, mystery shopping means a free lunch or dinner, and even getting to keep that branded bag you had to buy during your service check.

Anyone interested?