Mystery Shopping

With businesses like Richter Sounds, Co-op Topps Tiles and the pub chain Green alls professing the benefits of mystery shopping, it is clear that it has now come if age. A new wave of excellence seeking companies and customer-focused management teams are now joining the queue to learn how it can boost profits. This is in no small way due to the likes of Kate Jacobson of Manchester-based ABA Quality Monitoring.

Jacobson is rapidly becoming the first lady of mystery shopping, delivering talks and papers on the subject in the UK, forging links with her American and UK counterparts, and being much sought after by today's successful entrepreneurs and retailers.

It's mid-afternoon and the high street is moderately busy. In the local music store (it could be a bank, bar or beauty salon) two sales assistants stand chatting, eyeing up potential boyfriends whilst a women carrying a clipboard and mobile phone waits to be served.

Eventually, one of the girls ambles along the counter continuing her discussion. Unimpressed with the lack of attention the customer writes on her clipboard, 'Staff uninterested and need disciplining-over-dressed and too much make-up'. Two weeks later the girls are out of work and the store manager considers his market research budget well spent!

Fortunately, mystery shopping has moved on a lot in the last few years, becoming an integral training tool rather than the old-fashioned firing mechanism it used to be.

With businesses like Richer Sounds, Co-op, Topps Tiles and the pub chain Green alls professing the benefits of mystery shopping, it's clear that it has now come of age. A new wave of 'excellence seeking' companies and customer-focused management teams are now joining the queue to learn how it can boost service and profits.

This is in no small way due to the likes of Kate Jacobson of Manchester-based Aba Quality Monitoring. Jacobson is rapidly becoming the 'first lady' of mystery shopping, delivering talks and papers on the subject here in the UK, forging links with her American and European counterparts, and being much sought after by today's successful entrepreneurs and retailers.

Apparently, she says, there's a lot more to it than simply assessing staff performance. If mystery shopping is done well it provides vital links with other corporate initiatives such as training, marketing and other forms of research.

Unfortunately it's suffering from too many companies conducting poorly managed programms, using unrealistic scenarios and assessor teams which are selected without the right care and attention'.

There are clearly different techniques being used by different mystery shopping companies. This was important for Geoff Fink of storage retailer Access Space. He said �we interviewed a number of leading firms offering mystery shopping programms but had little confidence in many of them. For us the most important elements of the service experience are those which are less quantifiable and considered to be subjective or emotional-how the staff members made you feel, how a problem was handled. We were also concerned about the quality of results where firms are using part time assessors. Aba satisfied us on all these points�.

Mystery Shopping |