There’s a friendly imposter among us

You’ve heard of mystery shopping but what about mystery staffing? It shows you what customers really do compared with what they say they’ll do

Mystery shopping has been used by retailers for years to check on the performance of sales staff. An outsider acts as a customer and reports back on their experience, to assess how the store and staff are performing. Mystery staffing turns this on its head. We work with clients to pose as staff members — thereby able to interact with both customers and staff.

Getting close to your customers isn’t always easy. They can seem a long way from the boardroom and design research experiments can feel staged. But sales staff are close to customers all day every day and are often the ones who understand what makes them tick. Figuring out how staff can help us to get more authentic insights from customers inspired the idea of mystery staffing, and we’ve used it to learn about customers in CPG, retail and B2B software sales.

Innovation comes from finding problems and designing solutions, and mystery staffing gives us a rich picture of customers and their problems. It also shows us how staff resolve them. This helps us see how we can create innovation for customers and staff; satisfying the needs of both is one of the keys to making innovation stick.

By working side by side with staff, we get closer to customers and their problems and avoid falling into the ‘say-do gap’ (where what customers actually do is different to what they say they’ll do).

Mystery staffing is in addition to other forms of design research, not instead. But talking to customers in situ gives different answers to when they’re asked by a manager, consultant or designer. An added benefit is that by working closely with staff, we’re able to detect problems they’re having that they wouldn’t typically report to management and find solutions to these too.

How to do mystery staffing

• Get shoulder-to-shoulder with staff. It’s crucial that they know you’re there to make their jobs better, and that you’re not mystery shopping them or spying on them. Spend as much time and create as much space as possible to build trust and listen to them. You could create a physical, visual project space where they can learn what’s going on and engage, so they feel included.
• Find the heroes. Every sales team has heroes that help you get under the skin of what’s really going on and will be ambassadors to the rest of the team.
• Authentic customer service. You won’t be completely trained as a staff member but you can wear the shirt (or uniform), understand the common questions that will arise, know the background on the account, know what you’re talking about, and be as authentic as possible.
• Know how to fall back gracefully. Never make things up.
• Know what to do if a customer asks a question you can’t answer, and who to refer to if you need help.
• Have (structured) questions in your back pocket. Just because these aren’t formal research interviews doesn’t mean you don’t need to prepare. Have learning goals, discussion prompts and questions, so you can synthesise the data later. Link these to specific behavioural triggers so that you’re linking your observations back to real behaviours.
• Synthesise constantly, visually and with the staff team. Don’t wait until the end of the project to try to remember everything you saw and heard. That’s how the details that make observation valuable get lost. It has to be captured and analysed as you go, so put time in your schedule to reflect and capture. The ratio of observation to reflection should be about 50/50.

This is an excerpt from our latest book Purpose: Built, it’s all about making change happen and designing a brighter, better future. If you’d like a copy of request one here and sign up to our monthly newsletter to keep up to date.

Author: Jason DaPonte, is a Business Director at Magnetic. If you’d like to talk to Jason about mystery staffing and customer closeness, email jason.daponte@wearemagnetic.com.