What do your customers want from you? Chances are, you already know. Employees who are friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. They want doing business with you to be convenient. And when they need help, they don’t want to wait forever or get bounced from one employee to another.
Recent research from customer experience expert Shep Hyken backs that up. In his 2026 customer service research, 93% of customers said kind and helpful employees were important, while 92% valued both convenience and knowledgeable employees. Another 91% wanted to reach the right person the first time, and 89% wanted fast responses.
None of that is especially surprising. The more useful question for you as a business owner is this: Are those the experiences your customers are actually getting?
Mystery shopping helps you answer that question. You know what good customer service should look like. A mystery shop shows you what happens when you’re not standing nearby.
Are Your Employees Ready to Help?
Being friendly seems like a low bar. So does knowing the products and services you’re selling. Yet either can break down during a busy shift, when an employee is having a bad day, or when a customer asks a question that wasn’t covered during training.
Hyken’s research found that customers place almost equal importance on helpfulness and knowledge. And knowledge doesn’t require memorizing the answer to every conceivable question. As Hyken points out, sometimes it simply means knowing where to find the answer or who to ask.
A mystery shopping program can turn these broad expectations into things you can actually observe. Did the employee acknowledge the customer? Did they listen before answering? Did they provide accurate information? If they didn’t know something, did they make an effort to find out? Did the customer leave feeling helped?
You can have an employee who knows every product on the shelf but makes customers feel like they’re interrupting something. You can also have the friendliest employee in town confidently giving customers the wrong information.
You need competence and courtesy.
How Much Work Are You Making the Customer Do?
Hyken reports that 92% of customers want a convenient experience, while 91% want to reach the right person the first time. Both come down to effort.
Think about what happens when someone who has never visited your business walks through the door. Can they figure out where to go? Is your signage clear? Can they find someone for help? Does that employee know what to do?
Now consider the same experience over the phone. Or through your website.
A customer calls with a simple question, gets transferred, explains the situation again, gets transferred again and repeats the whole story. By the time they finally reach the right person, the actual problem may be solved in thirty seconds. Unfortunately, you’ve already spent five minutes teaching that customer how difficult you are to deal with.
These points of friction can be surprisingly hard to spot from inside your own business. You know which employee handles a particular problem. You know which door to use, which form to fill out and where the information is buried on your website.
Your customer doesn’t. That’s why it’s so important that a mystery shopper approaches your business without that institutional knowledge. By following the same path a real customer would take, a shopper can uncover unnecessary steps, confusing instructions, poor handoffs and other frustrations that have gradually become invisible to everyone who works there.
How Long Are You Making Them Wait?
Finally, customers want speed. Hyken’s research found that 89% consider fast customer support responses important. That expectation reaches well beyond a customer service hotline.
How long does someone stand at the counter before being acknowledged? How many times does the phone ring? If a customer submits a question through your website, does somebody respond that afternoon, tomorrow or sometime next week? What happens when a frontline employee needs a manager’s help?
Mystery shopping puts numbers to experiences that otherwise get described vaguely as “pretty quick” or “not too bad.”
It can also reveal how employees handle unavoidable waits. A customer may understand that your team is busy. An employee who looks up, acknowledges them and says, “I’ll be right with you,” creates a very different experience from one who leaves them wondering whether anyone has noticed them.
A few seconds of attention can change the perception of a wait.
You Know. Now Measure.
Perhaps the most useful thing about Hyken’s research is how unsurprising it is. Your customers want helpful people who know what they’re doing. They want an experience that doesn’t make them jump through hoops. And when they need assistance, they want someone to respond.
You probably already expect your employees to deliver those things. The question is whether they consistently do.
At The Brandt Group, we’ve spent more than 30 years helping businesses see their customer experience from the customer’s side of the counter. Our A+ Better Business Bureau-rated team can design mystery shopping programs that evaluate your customer experience in person, over the phone and online, giving you objective information about what’s working and where your standards may be slipping.
When those shops uncover opportunities for improvement, our leadership training seminars can help you turn the findings into better habits throughout your organization.
You already know what your customers want. Partner with The Brandt Group and find out what you’re delivering.
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