There’s a question that comes up time and time again when talking to clients about mystery shopping. “That’s great, but how do we compare with our competitors?”
And it’s a perfectly reasonable question. Knowing how well your own business performs is useful, but understanding whether you’re doing something better or worse than the competition? That’s potentially much more valuable.
The problem is that our industry hasn’t always made answering that question particularly easy. Or affordable, for that matter.
Over the years, we’ve come up with some rather creative solutions. Clever scoring systems, behavioural indexes, industry rankings and all sorts of impressive-sounding methodologies designed to tell businesses how they compare.
Some even come with their own fancy acronyms. We do love an acronym in this industry.
But there’s something about all this that has always bothered me.
Just because you can compare two numbers doesn’t necessarily mean you’re comparing the same thing.
Same score. Different question. What’s the point?
Let’s take two businesses operating in the same sector. Both have mystery shopping programmes, both measure customer service, and both receive an overall performance score.
Business A scores 85%. Business B scores 78%.
Brilliant. Business A must be delivering the better customer experience, right?
Well, not necessarily.
What if Business A’s questionnaire contains 20 questions focused on service standards, whilst Business B’s contains 35 questions measuring a much more detailed sales journey? What if one programme tests a straightforward enquiry and the other involves a complex customer scenario?
Even if you apply a consistent behavioural scoring index across both, the underlying experiences haven’t necessarily been measured in the same way. And that matters.
You can create the most sophisticated scoring methodology in the world, but if the underlying research isn’t comparable, how meaningful is the comparison?
I’m not suggesting these indexes have no value. They can provide interesting context and a broader perspective on performance. But there’s a difference between an indicative comparison and a properly designed, like-for-like benchmarking study.
And personally, if I’m investing in research to understand how my business compares with the competition, I’d quite like to know we’re all being measured against the same things.
Of course, you could just mystery shop everyone…
The traditional alternative is to commission a bespoke competitor study. And to be fair, this can be a brilliant solution.
You agree which competitors you want to measure, develop a consistent customer journey and questionnaire, and send mystery shoppers into your own business and theirs. Done properly, you can get some genuinely valuable competitive intelligence.
The catch? You’ve now got to pay for all of it.
Your own mystery shopping programme, plus the competitor visits, plus the research design, fieldwork, validation, analysis and reporting.
And if you want to do it again in six months to see what’s changed, well, you know how that conversation goes.
For businesses with substantial research budgets, that’s absolutely fine. But surely there should be a way for more organisations to access meaningful competitive benchmarking without having to commission an entire research project themselves?
What if we shared the research instead?
This is where syndicated benchmarking comes in. Hardly a revolutionary concept in the wider world of market research, but one that I think mystery shopping could make much better use of.
Rather than designing separate programmes for individual businesses, we bring together organisations operating within the same sector and create one independently designed study.
Everyone is assessed using the same questionnaire, customer journey, scenarios and measurement criteria. We carefully consider the shopper profiles, sampling, fieldwork periods and quality controls to ensure the comparisons are as fair and consistent as possible.
In other words, we start by designing a proper piece of market research.
Same questions. Same journey. Same methodology. A genuinely meaningful comparison.
And here’s the other important bit. Because multiple businesses participate, the research costs are shared.
Suddenly, access to independent competitive benchmarking becomes much more affordable. And because the methodology is consistent, it creates opportunities to repeat the study and understand how performance across a sector is changing over time.
It’s a pretty simple idea really. Sometimes the best ones are.
Please don’t just give us another league table.
Of course, a brilliantly designed study is only half the job.
Because once you’ve collected all that lovely data, you’ve then got to do something useful with it.
And I think this is another area where our industry has a tendency to get a little carried away. We produce beautiful dashboards, enormous PowerPoints and more charts than anyone could reasonably need.
But what does the research actually tell us?
Imagine a study across the automotive sector revealing that dealerships are consistently good at demonstrating vehicle features, but much less effective at understanding customers’ needs before making a recommendation.
Or a veterinary study uncovering differences in how practices explain treatment options, discuss costs and reassure concerned pet owners.
These are hypothetical examples, but they’re exactly the sort of meaningful findings that well-designed benchmarking can uncover.
We want to identify the key themes across a sector, the behaviours separating stronger and weaker customer experiences, and the opportunities businesses might be missing.
Then we want to bring those findings to life.
Not through 60 slides of data, but through engaging, thoughtfully designed reporting that highlights the important findings, explains the evidence behind them and makes it clear what businesses could actually do differently.
Because discovering that your business scored 82% against a sector average of 86% might be interesting.
Understanding exactly which behaviours are contributing to that gap, and what your competitors are doing differently?
Now that’s useful.
Introducing Silent Benchmark
All of this thinking is behind something we’re developing at Silent Customer called Silent Benchmark, our new syndicated sector benchmarking proposition.
The approach combines properly designed mystery shopping research with independent, consistent sector comparisons and our rather different approach to reporting.
Instead of simply producing another score or ranking, we want to help businesses understand how they really compare, identify the most important sector-wide findings and give them practical insight they can use.
Our Silent Summary reporting approach will bring the research together into a clear, engaging story. The key themes, the most important behavioural differences, supporting evidence and a handful of recommendations worth paying attention to.
All delivered in a format designed for busy people who want to understand the findings without spending their Friday afternoon deciphering a dashboard.
And because the research costs are shared, businesses can access this level of competitive intelligence without funding the whole thing themselves.
Coming in 2027: Automotive, Veterinary and more.
We’re preparing to launch our first Silent Benchmark studies across the Automotive and Veterinary sectors in early 2027, with further sectors to follow.
Both have fascinating customer journeys where trust, communication, product knowledge and understanding customer needs can make an enormous difference to the overall experience.
We’re currently inviting organisations interested in participating to register their interest and would love to hear from businesses who want a better understanding of how they compare with the wider market.
Because benchmarking should be about much more than giving everyone a score and announcing who’s won.
It should help businesses understand what’s happening across their sector, what the best experiences have in common and where they have an opportunity to improve.
And to do that properly, you’ve got to start by measuring the same things.
Funny that.
Find out more about Silent Benchmark and our upcoming sector studies.
Measure behaviour. Change outcomes.
