mystery guest

mystery guest (plural mystery guests)

1. (marketing, business) A person hired by a company to pose as a customer in order to evaluate the quality of its service.
   • 2007, Ken Kaser, Dotty B. Oelkers, Sports and Entertainment Marketing, Cengage Learning, →ISBN, page 111:

     For example, an amusement park may hire an outside marketing firm to send a mystery guest to the park to evaluate his or her experiences with the park's sales and service employees.

   • 1995, Time Sharing Institute, Worldex Corporation, Vacation Industry Review: A Publication of the Time Sharing Institute, The Institute, page 103:

     Another consideration is setting up the program to avoid departmental rivalries and bias by applying objective measures of effectiveness. For example, to check on frontdesk performance, the mystery guest can record how long the clerk took to answer the phone.

   • 2013, Noel Scott, Eric Laws, Knowledge Sharing and Quality Assurance in Hospitality and Tourism‎, Routledge, →ISBN:

     A mystery guest check by means of e-mail inquiries sent to selected tourism organizations was undertaken to determine the response behaviour and breadth of information provided.

2. (television) A guest star whose identity is kept secret.

   Guess who will be our mystery guest this week.

   • 2009, William Shatner, Up Till Now, Pan Macmillan, →ISBN, page 158:

     On this show the celebrity guest came out dressed in a costume that hid his or her identity. Based on the costume the panel asked questions until they figured out the identity of the guest. The mystery guest in this sentence is dressed as Cap'n Andy, the captain in Jerome Kern's classic Show Boat, and the set was the deck of a paddle-wheel steamer.

• mystery shopper