Mystery Shopper

Mystery Shopper is a technique often used in the private sector. It involves an individual (or group) using a service and feeding back their view of things like customer care, cleanliness, availability of goods etc. Mystery shoppers can also assess telephone help lines or call centres using set questions or trying to get a set response.

Advantages

It can involve local people or service users in your consultation exercise by utilising their knowledge and skills. This can be empowering for participants.
You gain a different perspective of your service,from one which uses professional researchers.
It can complement other user satisfaction surveys.
It can be used to monitor equality issues and assess the quality of services delivered to a diverse group of residents.
It can provide a training opportunity for service users / residents if your mystery shopper exercise uses local people.

Disadvantages

Staff can feel defensive about the use of this undercover technique. An organisation must be open about the use of mystery shoppers. They must: detail the specific business purpose of the exercise; and assess the impact of the monitoring on the privacy, autonomy and other legitimate rights of staff. Those initiating the mystery shopping activity must comply with the Data Protection Act and the Human Rights Act. For further details about these matters see this user guide.
Service users or residents might feel anxious about being identified.
Resource intensive if you want a large sample.

When to use

When you need to establish what it feels like to be a service user.
If you want to complement (put flesh on) other quantitative satisfaction data.

Whoever acts as a Mystery Shopper should be appropriately briefed to ensure they act responsibly and within some pre-set boundaries. A short ‘training session’ for shoppers would help set some ground rules for their work. Shoppers will also need to know how you want information recording and what will happen to the information once it is collected.

If you do use local people or service users for this type of approach try to ensure you have systems in place so they are not ‘out-of-pocket’. Paying basic expenses, such as travel costs, entry costs, telephone costs etc. is essential.

Article from Local Authority Research and Intelligence Association (www.laria.gov.uk)

Why Not Mystery Shop?

BY CLARE LOWE, MVA AND ADAM THOMPSON, MEDWAY COUNCIL

HOW MEDWAY COUNCIL USES MYSTERY SHOPPING AT MEDWAYTO IMPROVE FRONT LINE SERVICES

Whilst the public sector is a major user of market research, the use of mystery shopping as one of the techniques available appears to be fairly limited. There are more than 100 research agencies listed in the Market Research Society (MRS) handbook who undertake mystery shopping but this is predominantly for clients in sectors such as financial services, telecommunications, food, leisure and retail rather than local government. This is perhaps surprising given the clear parallels between the public and private sector when aiming to deliver customer focused services. Mystery shopping is highly appropriate for performance measurement and for examining in detail the processes behind service delivery and where improvements might be made – something local authorities are consistently striving to do.

Mystery shopping simply involves the use of trained evaluators to act as a customer and to objectively report back on their experience. The evaluators are given a scenario to act out, which, in line with MRS guidance on mystery shopping, must be relevant, credible, practical and objective.

MYSTERY SHOPPING AT MEDWAY

Medway Council is now in its third year of using mystery shopping to monitor performance of their first point of contact with customers and to deliver improvements. The programme of research is undertaken twice a year by MVA involving face-to-face visits and telephone calls to council offices and facilities as well as written enquiries by both letter and e-mail. The scenarios in Medway are based on real life enquiries that people make to the Council to ensure that they are realistic and credible, e.g.:-

My neighbour has a high hedge causing excessive shade in my garden

I have a sofa that I want to get rid of – how do I go about it?

I am thinking of opening a restaurant and would like advice on environmental health issues.

I am interested in my child going to Fort Pitt School. What is the admissions policy?

One of the pitfalls of mystery shopping is that it can be regarded with suspicion by front-line staff. To overcome this they must be very clear when the mystery shopping exercise is in progress (indeed this is an ethical requirement), and also how the research will be used, preferably through access to the findings and to any changes that arise. Another pitfall is that staff may attempt to play ‘spot the mystery shopper’. The way around this is to make scenarios as credible as possible, not use the same face-to-face or telephone evaluator in the same situation; provide a (real) local address for postal responses and ensure that email enquiries are sent from different e-mail addresses. Mystery shopping may also be considered a problem in that busy staff may have to spend time on something that is not a genuine enquiry. The answer to this in Medway was to neither make the overall programme of enquiries too large nor to overburden any particular individual or section, as well as spreading enquiries over a reasonably long period of time.

EVALUATING SERVICES

Evaluation is an important part of the overall mystery shopping process and it is essential that it is carried out in an objective and systematic way. In Medway an evaluation form was developed for each type of enquiry which assessed factors such as waiting times; the appearance, politeness, helpfulness and friendliness of staff and whether the enquiry was deal with satisfactorily in terms of the information received. Whilst some of the mystery shopping measures are factual (e.g. the number of times the phone rings before being answered; how many days before a letter/email response is received) others are more a matter of judgment. The standardised form, and the briefing that evaluators receive, are both critical in ensuring that there is objectivity in the assessment.

USING THE RESULTS

The mystery shopping programme of research has been used to provide evidence for developing operational and strategic improvements for the Council. The results provide performance information for the Council as a whole and for each Directorate and service. These are compared with previous waves to monitor performance over time.

In the early days, the results were used extensively to improve operational matters within the pilot contact centre. This ensured, for example, appropriate greetings were given, and responses were warm, friendly and gave high quality responses to customers’ needs. Mechanisms have also been put in place to ensure that the results of the mystery shopping are continuously monitored. A cross-directorate group was established which monitors results and makes recommendations for improvements, and a customer user group set up which meets to discuss issues as and when they arise from the mystery shopping. This led, for example to a recent telephone survey to review equalities issues regarding face to face contact at reception points and how this can be improved.

The results have also been used to create corporate wide Customer Care Standards and Guidelines, helping to ensure that all services are now fully aware of the customer care performance standards they should aim to achieve.

Medway is now undertaking a project to introduce a new contact centre using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology. Services from across the council will be incorporated into this on a phased basis beginning in June 2005. This project provides an opportunity to use the mystery shopping results in a much more strategic way, as these services are reviewed and adapted for the new way of working.

CONCLUSIONS

Mystery shopping has proved to be a useful and appropriate technique for Medway. It has enabled them to measure performance effectively; explore and fine-tune their processes of service delivery and is being used to inform strategic change.

For further information please contact Clare Lowe at MVA - clowe@mva.co.uk