Mystery Shopping - Quality Control or Staff Snooping?

BBC Working Lunch has come up trumps for business studies once again - this time with a snappy 3 minute video looking at the growing use of mystery shopping…

Mystery shopping has been around a long time. I first came across it back in the 1980s working with a client that owned a chain of 20 cookie stores (it was a mystery to me why people shopped there - but that’s another story).

The video suggests that businesses are making increasing use of mystery shopping to gather insights into customer service quality, attitudes of employees, operational effectiveness and so on. Great news for the marketing department I’m sure - but what about the employees being snooped on? Plenty of scope here for a solid plenary discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of mystery shopping for a business, and for students to consider the alternatives (e.g. customer service questionnaires).
Here is the link to the BBC Working Lunch video