Telephone Mystery Shopping

We regularly conduct telephone mystery shopping exercises on behalf of both the public and private sector, whether to gauge customer relationship management or staff product knowledge; or to assess competitor protocols and pricing. The scope and objectives of telephone mystery shopping are wide, and can involve multilingual, multi-disciplinary and multi-channel routes.

If this is your first time planning a mystery shopping exercise, please feel welcome to email us your specs or to have an informal chat; we'll be happy to give advice and, where appropriate, cost estimates.

Our staff are some of the best in the industry and will adhere strictly to protocol. They are also very experienced in eliciting and probing responses, giving you an excellent framework for subsequent qualitative analysis.

Some examples

(1)  Hotels - Customer Handling
In conjunction with the Scottish Centre of Tourism, we contacted 100 hotels all over Scotland, posing as German and French tourists. Our staff asked a series of questions in either German or French, and pretended they could not speak or understand any English.

This study exposed the very poor ability on the part of Scottish Hotels to deal with foreign language enquiries and, aside from receiving widespread media coverage, has made a profound impact on political initiatives to improve Scotland's tourism services. The study has been cited worldwide. (see related article on the right).

(2)  Supplier Performance - Customer Handling
Our client is one the world's best known security-equipment manufacturers but is reliant for a large segment of its sales on independent retail shops. We were asked to see how well these shops were handling customer enquires, as well as their response times to call-out requests, and their cost charges.

Methodology was complex due to the high variation of possible responses by respondents.

As a result of this studies, our client reviewed its contract with a number of retail outlets.

(3)  Re-seller Performance - Contractual Obligations
A world-leading manufacturer of office-related materials wanted to know how diligently their re-selling partners were promoting their brand of materials to their own customers. We contacted countries all over Europe, posing as potential customers, and tested each re-seller on their willingness to promote our client's brand of materials. The research exposed some critical issues relating to the client's promotional and distribution strategy.

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Here's one of our first ones ...

"SCOTLAND’S struggling tourism industry took another knock yesterday [March 2002] when it emerged hotels are losing out on valuable European business because staff cannot speak a foreign language.

"A survey, carried out on behalf of the Scottish Centre of Tourism (SCOT), has shown the Scots to be a nation of dunces when it comes to trying to attract business from French and German tourists.

"Eighty per cent of the hotels contacted were unable to answer a single question in French, and 87 per cent were unable to answer a single question in German. Equally embarrassingly, 7 per cent of hotel staff thought "Deutsch" meant the same as "Dutch"."

And here's one we did the other day ...

"New mystery caller research announced today reveals that only one in four companies excel at making a good first impression with callers. The FTSE First Impression Index, commissioned by outsourced reception provider Moneypenny, has revealed a new look FTSE listing where only the friendliest and most helpful companies top the charts and share price is meaningless.

" ... Research was conducted amongst the 100 FTSE listed businesses during August 2009 by independent telephone research specialist PEXEL on behalf of Moneypenny. In each call, a trained researcher called the company's main UK switchboard, where they followed a pre-ordained script to ascertain specific information and were rated on their response. This information included requests for a complaints email, internet address, office address, directions to the office or CEO name. Ten calls were conducted with each company over a four week period, with calls matched to ensure that each organisation received the same quantity of each query, from both male and female callers. The scores for each rating were added across all calls and an overall metric produced."

Read the article ...

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