Press

Mystery shoppers gauge things that are important to making a sale, but not necessarily of interest to customers at the particular time.

“A customer in a dealership is thinking about price and trade value, not whether the salesperson addressed specific features, asked for the sale or followed the sales steps,” said Fran O'Hagan, President & CEO of Pied Piper Management Company LLC. “Those are not what the customer focuses on, but they are what sells cars.”

Consumers who later fill out customer satisfaction surveys give feedback on their dealership experience. But there is a difference between asking buyers how they feel after the sale “and sending people into a dealership to find out what is happening during the sale,“ O'Hagan says.

Customers often aren't keyed into how to run a business, he says. “It's like Henry Ford said: “If I had asked my customers what they had wanted, they'd have said a faster horse.”