Mystery Shoppers

“Someone employed to test the service in shops and businesses by pretending to be a normal customer”

What was the problem? Office was a bit of a mess, there is a lot of noise and is made up of 3 departments- how do students perceive this? Decided that I wanted an objective on customer service and wanted a way to record our performance Brand Advisory Group: Brand and Tone of Voice

Why choose Mystery shoppers? Mystery shopper experience- Wetherspoons and Superdrug Test using students themselves seemed obvious way forward! 3 Brand and Insight Ambassadors did face to face and online mystery shop enquiries Qualitative feedback is valuable

What was successful? Great to have positive feedback and also have constructive feedback. e.g. “I would give the response a 9 due to the friendliness and quality of answer given. The only reason it is not a perfect 10 was (and this is only a personal thing), I usually, when emailing someone for the first time, like to see something under their name like a job title or location so that if I ever needed to contact/visit them, it would make it easier to do so. This only applies to email address’ that do not have a person’s name on.”

What was Successful? Great to see where we needed to work on; areas we have already started to look at is answering the general email and the office tidiness. Gives a legitimate platform for staff to improve their performance Objective evidence for any difficult conversations needed with staff We will be looking at individual staff feedback in the future Using a hard measure in the questions ‘out of 10’ will allow us to benchmark the scores and compare at the end of the academic year.

Challenges? Hard to recruit BIAs that weren't known to the department I don’t directly line manage everyone in the department Will need to find new students to mystery shop in future- shop and mooch staff? Uncertainty on how to take this forward with Portland. Telling the team it was going to happen- I made it clear this was for student benefit “Bring it on!” Relaxed approach as individuals wont be tested; it was about the welcoming environment. Timing- need for an ‘average’ week and future testing

Take home messages Ensure staff feel relaxed. Focus on friendly and genuine service not ‘who isn’t doing their job’ Use the insight team- portal of resource and experience for this. It’s easy!! Just need to be clear on what you need to achieve and how you’ll use the insight Plan in benchmarks so you can celebrate improvements!