In a story

Company XYZ management heavily invests in advertising campaigns, trying to address various target groups. However, in spite of expensive marketing analyses the campaigns have been somewhat lacking effect. The management kept looking for an explanation, eventually they used mystery shopping.
Independent „shoppers“ visited company branches, kept ordering the same services, asking the same questions. It turned out that sales personnel at the branches is mostly unaware of the campaigns, only occasionally offering the right product. There is no sales drive worth mentioning. At some branches they even questioned or arrogantly dismissed customer’s information.
The company paused campaigns and focused on improving customer service, introduced communication channels to inform its employees about new products. When XYZ launched a new campaign afterwards, it had much greater impact.

Company ABC is a service provider which kept slowly, but steadily growing over the years. Everyone got used to it, company gradually expanded, recently it has reached several hundred employees and opened a brand new call centre.
After that growth slowed. It was unexpected, but management explained it by a recession. Still, when nothing changed after recovery, ABC started looking for an explanation. Several analyses pointed at internal processes, it looked as if the new call centre responded too slowly to sales strategies and was unable to sell the product to interested customers.
ABC decided to use mystery calling to verify this suspicion. Several respondents called call centre at various times and spoke with various employees. It turned out that none of them was familiar with the latest sales strategy, only 10% knew the new products and overall, interest in making a sale was rather low. Moreover, waiting time of over 5 minutes during rush hours on a paid line must have discouraged a large percentage of potential customers.
ABC replaced the call centre management and worked on improving communication between sales and the call centre. In two months’ time another mystery calling took place, which confirmed significant improvements. Since then ABC is using mystery calling regularly once a year to evaluate its call centre.