Becoming A Mystery Shopper

The key to becoming a mystery shopper is reward - or penalize - employees as a team rather than as individuals, he adds, stressing that mystery shopping is much more about using the carrot than the stick.

Why did Richer Sounds decide at the start of the year to rethink its mystery shopping strategy? "We'd done mystery shopping for about ten years, and it had already evolved quite a lot," says Robinson. Originally used solely to ensure that cash was going in the till, the emphasis had gradually shifted from the staff, known as sales colleagues, to the customers.

"A couple of years ago, we really began to focus much more on the customer perspective," continues Robinson, "and we realized we needed a mystery shopping specialist that could help us go much deeper into this area."

In the six months that Robinson has been working with ABA, he has been able to look at the whole customer experience "in much greater detail". He likes the fact that ABA will choose and train its mystery shoppers so they match exactly the customer profile being analyzed.

He gives one example: "We're doing a lot of work on the first-time buyer's experience, many of whom will be women, who we know often feel threatened and uncomfortable in our kind of shop. ABA is able to provide exactly the right kind of people to allow us to replicate their experience."

And Robinson is using the wealth of information provided to beef up his employee motivation scheme. "We are offering some quite serious rewards - up to 100 for each sales colleague - if a store meets the criteria being measured," he explains.

One of the reasons ABA were appointed was because "they spend a lot of time training their staff. A lot of mystery shopping specialists have a very casual approach and you just can't guarantee the accuracy of their visits".

Richer Sounds will make more use of mystery shopping in the future, particularly to maintain service standards in its newly franchised outlets abroad (Ireland and Amsterdam, so far). Robinson also wants to use more mystery shopping to monitor standards of service over the telephone, even though there is as yet no direct sales arm to his company.

Projecting the right corporate attitude should extend to the back room people, such as accounts and warehouse staff, he says. And he plans to use mystery shopping to ensure everyone in the company is singing from the same song sheet.

Such is the company's belief in the power of mystery shopping that it subsidizes its employees' holidays to the US on condition that they do some mystery shopping of their own and write up a short report on the retailing techniques of transatlantic stores.

But admirers of this customer-service zeal should take note. "There has to be an almost evangelical attitude right at the top of the company if mystery shopping is going to work properly," claims Robinson.

Mystery Shopping |