This is a question we receive all the time and with good reason. Our clients want to know what a good score is (and what a bad score is) so they can set reasonable goals internally as well as understand how their performance compares to their competition. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question. Many of our programs utilize similar shop templates with similar scoring, but they are not identical. Because each program is customized to fit the culture and philosophy of the organization, some reports are more difficult to score well on than others.
With this in mind, we have recently taken a look at a group of 18,038 shops (we chose to exclude some outliers) that were completed in the first half of 2022 in order to pull together some statistics that may help with understanding what a good mystery shop score is.
Data Summary:
- Industry breakdown-
- Roughly 60% hospitality
- Roughly 15% retail
- Roughly 15% fitness
- Remaining 10% across automotive, colleges, movie theaters, and several others
- Some clients allow bonus points, making the highest possible score above 100%
- Reports ranging in length from 10 questions up to 200+
Findings:
- The overall average score was 84.9%
- The median score was 89.8%
- The standard deviation was 15.99
- Count breakdown
- 1,447 reports scoring less than 60 – 8%
- 1,329 reports in the 60’s – 7.4%
- 2,081 reports in the 70’s – 11.5%
- 4,282 reports in the 80’s – 23.7%
- 8,898 reports in the 90’s and above – 49.3%
Looking at these numbers, we think it is safe to say that any score below 80% should be considered sub-par, anything in the 80s should be considered average or good, and anything in the 90s should be considered excellent (relatively speaking).
We always urge our clients to meet with us and discuss their program parameters if they feel the shops are set up to be either too difficult or too easy for their teams. We can customize things such as:
- Instructions (emphasizing some aspects of the experience for shoppers to focus on)
- Number of questions (general recommendation in the 50-60 range)
- Question format (yes/no, agree/disagree, 1-5 scale, etc.)
- Point weighting for each question (can either be all the same or different)
The shop requirements should ideally match up with everything the team is trained to deliver, so they know what they are being tested on. Because this varies from business to business, this can make it a little more challenging to do overall benchmarking, but we hope that these statistics from the first half of 2022 might help give you some guidance, nonetheless.
Please contact us if you’d like to set up a program with us, or if you are an existing client and would like to discuss your shop scores.