Strategic insights from mystery shopping in B2B relationships created by Jan Mattsson

This paper describes how mystery shopping can be used to gain valuable strategic input in B2B service relationships. We account for a longitudinal case study framed as a natural experiment (duration 18 months) in a Swedish group of consultancy companies offering a wide selection of industrial services to large Scandinavian corporations. We account for and analyse the process of building a mystery shopping procedure to get strategic insights from engineers delivering temporary consultancy services to these clients. After a successful trial period with three mystery shoppers the experiment (a guideline covering the themes of map, smoke and mirror as metaphors) has been extended to comprise a larger group of engineers and may be taken up in a company-wide way. The experiment was deemed effective in developing both a procedure for mystery shopping and a new way to train the consultants.