Choosing your Mystery Shopper Provider: Check for this Credential

Choosing your Mystery Shopper Provider: Check for this Credential

When you’re choosing a company to spearhead your mystery shopping and data gathering, there’s a lot of choices out there. But there’s one credential that you should make sure that your mystery shopping provider has: membership in MSPA Americas (Mystery Shopping Professionals Association), the professional trade association for the industry. MSPA Americas is a professional organization and resource that connects and supports the businesses that influence customer experiences through managing, quantifying, interpreting, enhancing and re-defining the customer experience.

The association recently celebrated its 20^th anniversary at its annual meeting in Vancouver, a format where member companies—including The Consumer Insight—shared ideas, interacted with industry experts and learned about the latest industry trends. It’s a diverse membership that includes marketing research and merchandising companies, loss prevention firms, consumer survey providers, and companies that specialize in providing mystery shopping services.

MSPA Americas is at the forefront of raising awareness of the mystery shopping industry, our services and educating freelancers about the unfortunate proliferation of mystery shopper scams, which we’ve written about previously.  I’m proud to be elected as a member at large for the board of directors of MSPA Americas and to help our customers understand the leading-edge practices in this dynamic industry. The Consumer Insight offers a broad range of services for leading brands, including audits, mystery shops, brand ambassador programs, telephone surveys, customer satisfaction polling, merchandising support assignments, and competitive analysis.