What is honesty shopping?
Also called integrity shopping, honesty shopping is the practice whereby trained shoppers act as ordinary shoppers, for the purpose of providing valuable sales procedure and customer service information to security managers and such. Most honesty shopping programs are designed to elicit the required information a company needs in order to make corporate decisions.
The goal of an honest shop may be to detect things like employee theft, the level of adherence to store policies and procedures, customer service protocols, store appearance and security measures. Essentially, an honesty shop works is this: An employee will be presented with a situation (by the shopper, who is undercover) that will force him to make a choice to be honest or not. For example, the honesty shopper may leave his credit card behind at the store. The “test” is to see whether the employee reports and returns the credit card, or tries to use it for his own purposes. Or, an employee may be asked to help the shopper steal (by not scanning an item through the checkout, for example). In each case, the goal of the honesty shop is to determine the level of honesty or integrity with which the store staff is operating.
These days, the average customer has begun to realize that they hold an enormous amount of power – purchasing power. Without their patronage, the store cannot exist. And because of that knowledge, customers have the opportunity and the wherewithal to shop in the stores that offer the best customer service. In order to ensure that their stores are providing the best possible customer service – and thereby attracting and keeping their customer base – many companies hire integrity shoppers. By using integrity shoppers, companies can gain invaluable information about how well their employees are trained, which can better help them zero in on the areas that need improvement. High-level decision makers can’t be in the stores at all times to take stock of what’s going on, and when they do visit the store they very often do not receive an accurate picture of what’s going on, as employees will generally be on their best behavior. But, as the adage goes, “when the cat’s away, the mice will play.” The same is true of employees when the big-wigs are not in sight. That’s where anonymous “secret shoppers” come in. They can gather information about how employees truly treat their customers, and provide that information to the corporations without the employees being any the wiser.
