Mystery Shopping UK

Alan Holliday, managing director of BDI, which claims to be the Mystery Shopping UK market leader, says his company uses technology to offer a very fast delivery of reports - anything from 72 hours down to 24 hours. The field force telephone in their results to operators, who use a piece of computer software called IRIS. This allows them to enter the questionnaire results directly into a processing system. All of this was a significant investment', says Holliday - perhaps pounds 750,000 over the years. A further investment in Internet technology will allow BDI to provide its clients with even more up-to-the-minute and online information.

But will clients be prepared to fork out for such a service? Bob Crowther, planning research manager at London Transport Buses, which has just begun its first-ever mystery shopping programme, thinks they will.

Mystery shopping is expensive,' he admits. It's at the dear end of market research. But the cost-effectiveness is excellent. Electronic data capture is very useful to us because the faster we can get the data through our own system and out to our operators, the faster they can act on it.'

A sobering word of warning comes from David Christie, founder of mystery shopping specialist Frontline and a former mystery shopping expert at Shell. Although mystery shopping is a very powerful measure, it's not the be-all and end-all of customer service,' he says.

It concerns me that a lot of companies are ignoring their own culture nowadays. If you treat people badly, they're not going to give good service, no matter how much you train them or reward them.'

David Robinson, managing director of Richer Sounds, the much-acclaimed, independent hi-fi retailer, was working behind the till last December at one of his company's 29 stores. It's something that Julian Richer, the founder and chairman, and I like to do in the run-up to Christmas,' he says.

One of his customers was Kate Butterworth, an off-duty director of Manchester-based ABA Quality Monitoring, a mystery shopping specialist. I was elated with the service,' she recalls, but it was a complete shock to see the same guy only a few weeks later under such different circumstances.'

She is referring to the strange quirk of fate that prompted Robinson, shortly after her fortuitous visit, to hold a pitch for a new mystery shopping company and, unwittingly, to select her company.

I like the fact that I was a customer of theirs before they became a customer of mine,� says Butterworth. It's very encouraging to work with a company that already has great customer service.�

Indeed it does. Richer Sounds, which started life 18 years ago, has featured in the Guinness Book of Records for the past six years. At pounds 17,553, its London Bridge outlet has the highest retail sales per square foot in the world. For the past five years, the company has also rated highest in terms of suggestions per employee, as monitored by UKASS (the UK Association of Suggestion Schemes). And as all good employers know, employees only use suggestion boxes if they think their ideas will be taken seriously.

Mystery Shopping |