Taking the mystery out of customer service
We offer a comprehensive mystery shopping service for your business.
What is Mystery shopping?
Mystery shopping is a long-established research technique used by a wide variety of companies. Its purpose is to help your company to assess and improve the standards of service you provide to your customers, by comparing your achieved performance against your own targets and against the standards provided by your competitors and other organizations.
The approach involves the use of evaluators (Mystery shoppers) who are specially trained to observe and measure the nature and quality of the services being offered to your customers. The evaluators collect the required information by calling upon or contacting your company's outlets or other points of contact with the public, acting as if they are actual customers for your services and carrying out a series of pre-determined tests involving observation.
Who are the Mystery shoppers?
We have a selection of staff to choose from and we would select the most appropriate person for your assignment, which may be one of the following:
- a customer on their own;
- a couple;
- a family;
- business people;
- a young person/s;
- a mature person/s;
- an OAP/s; or
- a disabled person.
The selected person/s will be thoroughly briefed before each assessment takes place and guideline notes provided to make sure there are no errors.
If the assignment calls for someone with experience of work within a particular industry, this is also possible. We can also provide an experienced worker within some industries, for example:
- sales staff;
- general Manger (& other levels of management) within Hotel, Conference Centre and Restaurant sectors;
- head Chefs and other level of chefs;
- store Departmental Managers; and
- nurses.
Why use our service?
We will provide you with a flexible, tailored package that will be measurable and user friendly. We adhere to the CIM code of practice. Whatever the criteria you wish to examine we will be happy to formulate a programme specifically for your needs.
Reasons for having a Mystery shopping assessment carried out
Increased competition within each industry and higher consumer expectations are continuously prompting many companies to focus more time and resources on establishing & maintaining higher levels of customer service so that they can keep a competitive edge. Having a mystery shopping assessment carried out will give you impartial feedback which avoids the preconceptions of your own staff and allows you to see for yourself through your customer's eyes.
Are you Discriminating?
You already had duties to make reasonable adjustments under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA), particularly to consider policies, practices and procedures and provide auxiliary aids and services where these would help access for disabled people.
From 1 October 2004 these duties were extended. You have to consider how to deal with physical features that are making it difficult for disabled people to use your service.
The Disability Rights Commission (DRC) booklet '2004 - What it means to you' states: "you are more likely to be able to comply with your duty to make adjustments to physical features if you arrange for an access audit of your premises and draw up an access plan. Acting on the audit may reduce the likelihood of legal claims against you".
If the law alone isn't enough to convince you to take action, consider other reasons. There are over 8.6 million disabled people in the UK spending an estimated £80 billion per year as consumers.
The DRC booklet 'Making access to goods and services easier for disabled customers' says, "if you currently have few disabled customers, this could simply be a reflection of how difficult access to your premises and goods and services is, so, in addition to your existing customers, give some thought to what improvements you can make for people who may become new customers."
The Hertfordshire based Disability Employer Outreach Service (DEOS) and our Mystery Shopping team have joined to provide a range of services to companies that will assist with their transition into the new Act.
Patrick McGeough of DEOS says, "We have a wide range of specialist services on offer to your organisation and we can provide high quality solutions for your business needs. We provide accurate information rather than panic inducing information. For example, under the DDA the average adjustment needed for premises costs £50. Not thousands! Socially your organisation will be more representative and diverse and in turn this aids morale and productivity among your staff and increases customer loyalty."
It is a good idea to take an inclusive approach when thinking about improvements to your premises. This will involve taking into account the needs of a range of disabled people. One way of doing this is to find out individual customer points of view about your facilities and their particular problems of getting around your premises.
By arranging a mystery shopping assessment to be carried out with us, we can arrange for trained disabled assessors to visit your premises and report back on how your facilities currently measure up to the new act's requirements. The results will clearly show you how easy or difficult the assessor found manoeuvring around your premises and how they were treated by your staff.
This will provide a 'snap shot' of how you are perceived by this target market and from the results of these assessments DEOS will be able to provide tailor made solutions for making any necessary improvements to your premises. They can also arrange training sessions for your staff to provide a general understanding of how attitudes and environment can affect disabled people, along with guidance on disability etiquette when meeting a disabled person.
Contact Us
For more information on these and other services, please contact Derek Williams at derek@thewowgroup.co.uk