The mystery shopping industry has come a long way over the past two decades. In its infancy, researchers pretending to be customers would simply visit a business then complete a short written report to give some idea of how well staff were performing.
The Mystery Shopping industry has certainly moved on and in order for a business to get a real unequivocal understanding of their customers’ experiences, today’s mystery shoppers use the sort of covert camera technology more commonly associated with spies and undercover police officers.
Leading mystery shopping company Douglas Stafford was formed in August 1989 after founder and Chief Executive Nigel Cook spotted a gap in the market for high quality monitoring of the customer service levels provided by sales staff in the automotive industry.
“I ran a number of car dealerships and wanted to mystery shop my sales team,” he recalls. “So I invited some consultants in to talk to me. These supposed experts came along with a blank sheet of paper, expecting me to tell them what to do in order to go away and arrange it. As a result, I ended up doing it myself, asking friends and relations to make telephone calls and visit showrooms. It struck me that if I couldn’t find a mystery shopping service of the quality that I required then other companies probably couldn’t either. And that is how Douglas Stafford began; I left my job and started the business as a specialist Mystery Shopping company.”
Today Douglas Stafford provides Mystery Shopping services to a number of industries including retail, financial and property as well as automotive. However, the benefit derived from the mystery shopping results remains as true today as it did then; to provide a true to life experience of how well a business operates from a customer’s point of view. From start up, Douglas Stafford has progressed year on year and today is one of Britain’s most successful performance improvement specialists.
The company now offers a range of services including customer satisfaction research and analysis including exit polls, training and accredited performance coaching as well as video, telephone and electronic mystery shopping. Douglas Stafford now has an impressive client portfolio including a multitude of leading brands.
As technology advances with increasing rapidity, Douglas Stafford has remained at the forefront of development. “When we started, telephone calls were recorded onto cassette tapes using microphone devices stuck to the handset – a far cry from the equipment we use today,” says Nigel Cook.
“We also experimented with recording physical shops but in the early years it was a long and arduous process of listening to long conversations, the results of which were very difficult to analyse effectively as editing facilities simply did not exist. In the 8Os, clients would receive a one-page report, analysing the service they had provided to their customers and from which a training programme would be drawn up.”
By investing heavily in video technology, the company developed a way of filming mystery shops, although in the early days the size of the equipment proved problematic. Tie pin cameras were available but rather visible and their tapes and batteries often didn’t last the duration of a shop, necessitating a quick dash to the bathroom to switch for new ones.
“Mystery shoppers did the best they could with the technology that was around at the time, but I was determined to find a better solution for video recording shops,” says Nigel Cook. He commented “In the warmer weather mystery shops were also a bit of a challenge as people would have to enter showrooms with coats on to cover the equipment up. Video equipment in those days cost several thousand pounds and after each wave of mystery shops we used to convert the information to VHS tape format and then dispatch them in big boxes so that our clients could watch their sales teams’ performance on a boardroom television.”
Today, technology has progressed to the point where cameras are so small they are now the size of a shirt button and digital recorders can record for many hours without needing to recharge the battery. “Our aim has always been to carry out a mystery shop without anyone suspecting that they are being filmed. The devices we now use provide astounding results, producing colour, high-definition digital images – it’s just like watching a television soap,” he says. “People are always amazed by the quality of the footage we provide our clients, using a camera with a lens the size of a pin head.”
The arrival of the internet means the days of one page reports and television viewings are long gone. Douglas Stafford utilises the internet to the full, providing a sophisticated and flexible online reporting and analysis tool, DSInsight™. Clients can listen to and view each mystery shop through the online video streaming and constantly monitor their company’s performance.
The company has always been at the forefront of new innovations within the mystery shopping industry. “We were the first mystery shopping company to provide video mystery shopping, the first to provide online reporting and the first to provide online audio and video streaming,” says Nigel Cook.
He believes that the results of their mystery shopping programmes give Douglas Stafford’s clients vital training and development tools to help their staff progress and provide ever improving levels of customer service. “Video mystery shopping makes a real difference because it gives our clients something tangible that can then be used as a training tool for performance improvement.”
Douglas Stafford’s Operations Director Ben Sergeant is also a keen advocate of using new technology to improve the products and services. The company’s clients can now benefit from a highly sophisticated telephone recording system that gives a real insight into their own customers’ experiences.
“Our mystery shoppers dial into our phone system which then records their calls to a retailer or car dealership. They then listen back and score their report before it is emailed to us for processing and putting online,” says Ben. “For example, we can automatically record booking calls made out in the field. If a dealership wants to phone that mobile number back, it will then automatically divert to our mystery shopper’s own mobile and also record that call. It is a completely seamless process now. This means we can provide our clients with results (a DVD or streamed online) that include the service booking call, any follow-up calls, footage of the visit itself and any calls made during or afterwards. Our clients get to hear and see the whole process exactly how it has been experienced by their customer.
“We are the first company to provide this complete service and it makes us unique. We like to keep ahead of the game so we do extensive research into equipment developments to ensure that we keep at the forefront of technological advancements. We strive to be the first to provide anything new.”
Today corporate companies spend large sums of money making sure their customer service levels are as high as possible, testing the quality of the experience through mystery shopping and then using training programmes such as the ones offered by Douglas Stafford to improve staff performance.
The internet has also empowered the consumer like never before, particularly when it comes to making a significant purchase. For example when buying a car you can find a number of cars online for a similar price and if the salesperson isn’t effective, customers will go elsewhere. It is therefore even more crucial that companies make sure sales staff are doing their job correctly every time someone walks through the door. If a customer is unhappy, they can write about it and put it on the internet within seconds. Having high levels of customer service is more paramount in today’s world than ever before.
“Quite reasonably, people want to receive good service,” says Nigel Cook. “We all know when we have received bad service, which we remember and talk about to our friends and colleagues. For many companies, Mystery Shopping does not just allow them to highlight issues, but is also key to helping them improve.
“Our performance improvement programmes are based on the premise that no matter how dazzling or damning the mystery shopping results, the real value lies in what is done with the information. Just as Douglas Stafford constantly innovates so that it remains at the forefront of our industry, companies have to constantly analyse their performance and improve – and that’s where we come in.”
For more information about Douglas Stafford go to www.douglasstafford.co.uk
