Mystery customer research in restaurant chains
Jane was very enthusiastic as the course she was studying
involved a live research project. The
whole approach of her course, particularly the research project, was to provide solutions
to real-life managerial issues, and she felt that this would really help her career in the large
restaurant chain that was sponsoring her. The research project seemed an ideal opportunity for
her to collect data from the head offices of competitor restaurant chains while working as a
student researcher. This could enable her to establish what was really best practice in terms of
setting performance standards and ensuring these were maintained in the chains of restaurants
run by these companies. Using contacts she had made on the course and her own knowledge
of the industry, she was confident that she could collect some really useful data that would
make a good research project and advance her career with her sponsor.
Jane’s research plans involved talking to people in the head offices of some of her employers’
major competitors. She was not concerned that this was unethical because while she was at university
her company was not actually employing her, even though they were sponsoring her.
She planned to share the results of her research with her company later on; indeed it was a condition
of the sponsorship that she do this.
Jane’s research involved two stages of data gathering. She hoped to start by looking at service
standards in a number of restaurant chains. She knew from her own working experience
that mystery customer monitoring of competitors’ service standards was a fairly common
industry practice. She therefore decided to start by devising a checklist, drawn from her own
experience of working in the industry and from reading refereed journal articles on service
standards. Using this, she planned a study that involved some participant observation of service
standards. She intended to visit a number of different competing restaurant chains as a mystery
customer and to record her experiences, if possible by using the video camera in her mobile
phone. The second stage of the research would involve depth interviews with these companies
where she would ask them to comment on some of the data she had collected.
Before she could start collecting data, Jane had to write a research proposal that described
and justified her research methods in some detail, and submit this to her research methods
tutors for approval. She also had to complete her Business School’s research ethics checklist.
This asked her to provide a brief description of her research method, which she duly did. It then
asked her a number of simple questions including:
Does your research involve any of the following:
Deception of participants? Yes/No
Financial inducements? Yes/No
Possible psychological stress? Yes/No
Access to confidential information? Yes/No
Any other special circumstances? Yes/No
Jane felt that she had to answer ‘yes’ to the deception question, but justified her use of
deception as a standard industry practice, referring to a recent search she had undertaken on
Google, which had revealed numerous ‘mystery customer’ companies offering their services of
which she felt her tutor would also be aware. She also cited two refereed journal papers by
Calvert (2005) and Erstad (1998), which she said had used mystery customers.
When Jane got her research proposal back she was horrified to discover that it had been
referred by her Research Methods tutor on ethical grounds. The tutor had consulted the
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Saunders, Lewis and Thornhill: Research Methods for Business Students, 6th edition, Additional Case Studies
© Pearson Education Limited 2012
Business School Research Ethics Officer (REO), whose views on the ethics of Jane’s research
were quite different from what she had expected. The REO had advised that the proposal
amounted to deliberate deception of participants, which was in breach of the University’s Code
of Practice on Ethical Standards for Research involving Human Participants. This stated that:
– potential participants normally have the right to receive clearly communicated information from
the researcher in advance,
– participants in a research study have the right to give their informed consent before participating,
– honesty should be central to the relationship between researcher, participant and institutional
representatives,
– the deception of participants should be avoided.
Jane assumed that the problem was with her mystery shopper exercise, but as it turned out
this was only a minor part of her problem. The REO agreed that the use of ‘mystery customers’
was standard practice in this sector and therefore permissible. However, Jane was asked to
make it clear that the restaurants being studied would not be identified in the research project,
and that it must not be possible when she carried out the interviews in the second stage that
any of the staff or customers involved could be personally identified by industry insiders.
The REO was much more concerned about the depth interviews in the second stage. In
particular, the REO was concerned that Jane proposed to present herself as a student, although
she was collecting data that she was going to reveal to a commercial competitor. It would be
unethical and unacceptable to use her role as a student at the University in this way, and might
well be viewed as a form of industrial espionage.
References
Calvert, P. (2005) ‘It’s a mystery: mystery shopping in New Zealand’s public libraries’, Library Review 54: 1,
24–35.
Erstad, M. (1998) ‘Mystery shopping programmes and human resource management’, International Journal of
Contemporary Hospitality Management 10: 1, 34–8.
Questions
1 What is the main ethical issue with regard to Jane’s proposed research project?
2 How can Jane change the design of her mystery customer observation method to avoid ethical problems?
3 How might Jane carry out the second part of her research – with the companies’ head offices – in an ethical manner?