Top Fish & Chip Shop in Ireland via Mystery Shopping

A Co Tyrone takeaway has been named the top fish and chip shop in Northern Ireland - again.

This is the second year in a row that The Dolphin takeaway in Dungannon has claimed the Northern Ireland crown and been shortlisted as a UK Top 10 fish & chip shop. 

It will now bid to be crowned Independent Takeaway Fish and Chip Shop of the Year at the 2017 National Fish & Chip Awards ceremony in January, organised by Seafish. 

To get to this stage, the Dolphin has had to be at the top of their game, facing appraisal by industry experts and mystery shopping assessments to ascertain customer service levels and the quality of fish and chips.

Malachy Mallon, owner of The Dolphin, said: "We are so proud to retain the Northern Ireland title for the second year in a row and to be shortlisted once again in the UK Top 10. To be here again feels just as amazing! 

"We've been running for over 27 years, striving to offer the best quality fish and chips, but it's our attention to detail and the care we take with our product and customer service that we believe really sets us apart from the rest. 

"We're absolutely thrilled to be acknowledged for our hard work; we have been assessed to within an inch of our life to reach this stage of the game, only the crème de la crème make it through." 

Source: Belfast Telegraph

Go Undercover: Improve Your Brand Experience with Mystery Shopping

Providing your customers with a consistently great experience across all channels helps them form a positive connection with your brand. When customers expect a great experience, however, their expectations have to be met or you risk disappointing them.

As this article from Entrepreneur highlights, a great brand experience means that customers are satisfied with each channel of your brand, including your website, branding, atmosphere, and employee interaction, but a single bad experience with one channel can ruin the customer’s perception of your entire brand.

Controlling your customer experience is easier on some channels than others. Because your website, mobile app, and marketing are entirely under your control and offer lots of data and feedback opportunities, you can ensure that your customers have great interactions on those channels. However, it can be difficult to ensure the same consistency in stores.

In your stores, atmosphere, communication, competing priorities, and employee engagement can all be barriers to a positive perception of your brand.

Fortunately, there is a way that you can ensure you are creating a consistent experience in stores, too: mystery shopping.

Improving Brand Experience with Mystery Shopping

Your stores may look great, and your employees may be highly engaged when you and your managers are watching, but how can you be sure your employees are creating a great customer experience when they aren’t being monitored?

A well-designed customer experience program that includes mystery shopping give you feedback on your total brand experience, as your customers experience it. Mystery shoppers compare your stores’ appearance and merchandising to your expectations and, most importantly, monitor how your employees interact with customers. Because mystery shoppers look just like regular customers, you gain invaluable insight into actual employee behaviors and customer interactions.

They are able to review all aspects of the physical shopping experience and target specific concerns, including cleanliness, use of brand strategies, and employee engagement. Because they experience your brand as a customer, mystery shoppers collect data you can use to adjust your strategy and correct employee behaviors.

The data collected by mystery shoppers can help you identify trends in brand experience and pinpoint where your strategies can be improved. It also allows you to ensure that your customers are greeted with a consistent experience regardless of time or location. This is especially important for chain retailers who may have difficulties with consistency across different regions and sales volumes.

Mystery shopping programs provide you with rapid feedback, and store managers receive extremely timely results along with tools they can use to improve store performance quickly. One of the biggest benefits of mystery shopping is that managers can use this feedback immediately to encourage employee engagement by recognizing outstanding performance in front of the whole team, as well as correct subpar behaviors with training. This ensures that unsatisfactory behaviors stop immediately without damaging further customer interactions.

As Forbes points out in this great article, a great brand experience is about creating a culture change, rather than a change in “culture talk.” Mystery shoppers help you ensure that culture change is real and visible at all stages of the shopping experience and give you confidence that your customers have a great, consistent experience with your brand at all times.

SOURCE: Business 2 Community 
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Tesla Hilariously Finishes Dead Last in #MysteryShoppers Study

If there’s a list Tesla is probably OK with not being at the top of, it’s ‘Best Car Salesmen’. The company boasts about its distribution and servicing model being unlike any other in the industry and the latest mystery shoppers study by Pied Piper, a real consultant and market research firm (not based on the HBO series Silicon Valley), kind of proved that it is the case by placing Tesla dead last.

The study sends “mystery shoppers” to dealerships across the US in several different locations per brand to measure “how well dealerships follow sales processes, such as asking qualifying questions and ultimately asking for the sale”, according to Ward Auto.

Apparently, Tesla doesn’t follow standard sales processes in the industry because Pied Piper placed the company last with 86 points, 10 points behind the second “worst”, Volvo with 96, and 28 points behind the highest ranked, Infiniti with 114 points.

Here’s the full ranking via Pied Piper:

 Pied Piper CEO Fran O’Hagan said that while staffers at some Tesla stores were found to act more like car salesmen, and to be fair a lot of Tesla store employees were previously employed at other dealerships, he says that at most Tesla stores, employees tended to act like “museum curators” because they were knowledgeable about the product, but they never asked for the sale, which is actually probably more in line with Elon Musk’s vision for Tesla’s retail experience.

In a 2012 blog post, Tesla’s CEO explained the company’s approach to distributing and servicing cars. He described the goal of Product Specialists, Tesla’s equivalent of salespeople:

“They are not on commission and they will never pressure you to buy a car. Their goal and the sole metric of their success is to have you enjoy the experience of visiting so much that you look forward to returning again.”

While Tesla scored the lowest in almost every single category in Pied Piper’s research, like giving out printed materials for shoppers to take with them, the automaker received the highest rating for discussing features unique from competition.

Tesla doesn’t use a franchise dealership models like most automakers in the US and instead owns all of its stores. It is still struggling to instate its distribution model in several states where the auto dealer associations are pushing back and trying to force Tesla to use their model through legislation preventing automakers to own auto dealerships.

The main issue with Tesla using the franchise model is that dealerships make most of their profit on servicing the vehicles they sell, while Tesla aims not to make a profit on service. Musk is on record saying that he thinks it’s “terrible” to make a profit on service.

SOURCE: Elektrek 
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Five Ways Ace Hardware Proves David Can Beat Goliath

MYSTERY SHOPPING IS REASON #1!

"So, what are the secrets that enable Ace to win in an incredibly competitive marketplace?"

1. They mystery shop their stores. Many companies use mystery shoppers in their stores, but what makes Ace Hardware different is that the stores are independently owned, yet they agree to be mystery shopped by the corporate cooperative that supplies their merchandise. The headquarters provides customer service training and mystery shopping services that the dealers know will take them to a higher level of customer experience. Ace corporate has created stringent standards their retailers must meet to earn the designation of “Certified Ace Helpful.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON FORBES HERE 
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How Smartphones Help Retailers Do Mystery Shopping Better

Little doubt exists about the importance of mystery shopping to omnichannel retailers in ensuring a positive and consistent, 360-degree shopper experience.

Mystery shopping is a secret weapon of sorts, allowing retailers to recruit shoppers to visit specific stores to make and record observations about everything from customer service to display compliance. In the old days, this was done with a pencil and a clipboard, but just as smartphones with geo-location replaced paperback road atlases, mobile technology is bringing a new normal to the industry.

When it comes to smartphones in retail, the app is front and center. Retailers today use apps to communicate with in-store beacons and map store traffic patterns, to capture consumer data using rewards programs, and even to drive sales with geo-located, push notification coupons.

Mystery shopping is the next on the list for smartphone evolution. While traditional mystery shopping has its benefits, the crowd of smartphone users is infusing mystery shopping with a new degree of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Based on retail customer feedback, here’s a breakdown of each method’s unique benefits: 

Traditional Mystery Shopping

As a prevailing and well-understood methodology, traditional mystery shopping has serious street cred. It’s tried and tested, well-established and low risk in situations where the research process from problem to hypothesis to survey development and solution is well-defined.

Traditional mystery shopping has the advantage where familiarity, domain expertise and special skills are required. A large office supply retailer we work with uses this method for in-depth analysis of customer service, including store associates’ ability to diagnose and fix issues with products. Quick service restaurants (QSR) and niche retailers who require special skills to assess the quality and temperature of food or products also greatly benefit from old-school mystery shopping. However, for issues of scale and speed that don’t require particular expertise, retailers should turn to the smartphone.
Mystery Shopping Gone Mobile

The mobile flavor of mystery shopping relies on a crowd of smartphone users—and rather than tens of thousands of hired and trained mystery shoppers, the crowd is millions of users strong. Mobile-enabled shoppers can collect in-store data quickly and economically across a large geographic footprint, identifying local, regional or national trends to ensure consistency chain-wide. Mobile surveys can also be modified as hypotheses change.

Real-time, actionable feedback and alerts is one of the many advantages of mystery shopping gone mobile, allowing retailers across industries to identify and remedy issues related to inconsistent or competitor pricing, customer service indicators like store cleanliness, manager presence and associate knowledge, speed to checkout, promotional effectiveness and compliance and more. If something appears out of place, shopper feedback can alert the appropriate manager in real-time, who can take immediate, remediating action based on relevant KPIs. We’ve seen this with one of our major consumer electronics clients, who is using the crowd to determine when and where their marquee product is out-of-stock or missing a display.

A Successful Smartphone Strategy

Paired with current app-based and IoT initiatives, mobile mystery shopping helps create a 360-degree view of the “human condition” within stores. The crowdsourcing methodology is fundamental to this equation and has impacted our lives in many ways. Crowdsourcing is helping companies like Waze revolutionize navigation by allowing drivers to map and share real-time alerts about their commute. MyShake is crowdsourcing earthquake detection. Even the Smithsonian Institute has signed on, crowdsourcing history through its online Transcription Center. Though not (yet) as ubiquitous or buzzworthy, mobile mystery shopping is rapidly gaining traction in retail, providing retailers with insights that are critical in their quest to create a consistent, omnichannel experience.

It’s time to bring this smartphone-enabled technology in-store, to do mystery shopping better than ever before.

SOURCE: Multi Channel Merchant 
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Onsite Mystery Shops -- Video

Mystery Shoppers to Anonymously Evaluate all Aspects of Aquarium

Amusement Advantage Inc., has been chosen by the Florida Aquarium to help identify ways to improve its business operations.
The popular tourist attraction is keen to get a better understanding of how visitors interact with the aquarium and pinpoint opportunities to enhance the guest experience.

Scot Carson, President and General Manager of Amusement Advantage said the company was eager to start working with the aquarium. “Our expertise and experience in the industry fits perfectly with The Florida Aquarium’s high standards of excellence and service delivery.”

Amusement Advantage will draw from their pool of 30,000 mystery shoppers to anonymously evaluate all aspects of the aquarium including ticket purchasing, food quality in the café and the educational nature of the exhibits and presentations.

Matt Heller, founder of Performance Optimist Consulting will analyse the report which intends to highlight opportunities for further improving leadership and staff engagement and therefore, the guest experience.

The partnership follows Amusement Advantage’s recent appointment of a Director of Business Development based in Orlando to better serve the Florida tourism industry. The company already provides mystery shopping services to over 400 attractions in the US and Canada.

“Amusement Advantage will provide valuable insights into what we are doing right as well as identity areas we need to improve on,” Scott Rose, Chief Operating Officer of The Florida Aquarium.

 

SOURCE: BlooLoop

Oman Air Launches Mystery Shopper Program 'to Become the Best'

Oman Air announced the initiation of a secret shopper program agreement this week with BVA Mystery Shopping Services.

“Oman Air’s mission is ‘to become the best,’” Oman Air CEO Paul Gregorowitsch said. “Whilst we have built an international reputation -- and won numerous awards -- for the quality of our goods and services, we know there is still more we can do. And as Oman Air continues to expand its fleet and network, it is especially important that we not only maintain, but also improve, the standard of service we offer to our customers.”

Mystery shoppers from the company will be taking on the user experience and will report the quality of services that are provided by the airline on all classes of airline travel offered by the company, in addition to the services offered at airports and the ticket purchasing process.

“The mystery shoppers will have full access to all Oman Air’s customer-facing services,” Gregorowitsch said. “And because they will be posing as regular passengers, none of the staff they interact with across their passenger journeys will know who the mystery shoppers are.” 

SOURCE: Gulf News Journal

If you're considering implementing a mystery shopper program for your company, or would like to join us as a mystery shopper, we'd love to have you join us!
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Mystery Shoppers Uncovered Surprising Secrets About Local Supermarket Chains

Mystery shoppers at Checkbook Magazine uncovered some surprising secrets about local supermarket chains, and the results might just have you switching where you choose to buy food for your holiday meals.

Checkbook Magazine surveyed consumers and did its own mystery shopping to compare prices.

It shopped a list of 150 items at various chains all across the Delaware Valley, and what it found may surprise you.

Depending on your regular supermarket preferences, you might want to head elsewhere!

Click here to watch video from ABC6 News 

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Secret Shoppers Helping Improve Customer Service

A team of more than 100 mystery shoppers are helping improve customer experiences on Jersey's high street.

Secret shoppers talk to sales assistants and buy products, then write up reports about the level of service they received.

Retailers say it is the only real way they can get an idea of what it feels like to shop in their stores.

People often say to me, well surely you could judge it by sales. We can to a degree, but what you don't know by just judging it by sales is how many sales we lose if we don't give good service. So customer service, and measuring customer service is absolutely critical.
– David Elliott, Retailer

One mystery shopper has given her top three tips for retailers to deliver good customer service. Claire Boscq-Scott says it is all about delivering the basics:

Greet the customer
Smile
Use eye contact

The best customer service you can give is just so simple, it's all about basics, a smile, eye contact, a hello, those are the three free gifts you can give your customers and I think when people don't get the customer service and you get an apathy, when you get people who are not happy in what they do in their own jobs, themselves, they're not happy inside so they're never going to deliver a good service.
– Claire Boscq-Scott, Secret Shopper

SOURCE: ITV News 

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Dreamshakes Named Cream of the Warrington Market Crop After Mystery Shopper Survey

DREAMSHAKES was awarded a perfect score during a recent mystery shopper survey at Warrington Market.

Undercover shoppers visited each stall on Warrington Market to rate them on criteria including Criteria included cleanliness, friendliness, customer engagement, interpersonal skills, display of merchandise and overall experience.

The survey was undertaken as part of the selection process for stalls going in to the new Warrington Market.

A number of stalls scored over 90 per cent in the survey, but Dreamshakes came out on top – achieving a maximum score.

Get Stuffed Takeaway and Carvery came in second place in the survey, with Baker J’s Takeaway coming third.

Cllr Mike Hannon said: “We are delighted with the high standard of comments received for the majority of market traders from the mystery shoppers – we knew that our market traders were good but it is nice to have confirmation in this manner.

“I couldn’t be more proud.”

If you're considering implementing a mystery shopper program for your company, or would like to join us as a mystery shopper, we'd love to have you join us!
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The Irish Kings of Online ‘Mystery Shoppers’ Now With $20m in Their Coffers

A DUBLIN COMPANY that takes the ‘mystery shopper’ concept online for the world’s biggest grocery producers has announced a major cash injection as it ramps up its international expansion.

Clavis Insight has received a $20 million (€17.6 million) investment from US venture capital firm Accel-KKR to fuel its growth in the US, Europe and China.

Garry Moroney started Clavis in 2008 and it has since expanded to almost 150 staff across offices in Dublin, Boston, London and Shanghai.

The majority are employed in its Dublin headquarters, where the company handles its main software development and data analysis.

Moroney sold his previous business, software firm Similarity Systems, to US-based Informatica in a cash deal worth nearly $55 million in 2006.

Clavis is expected to double its headcount to around 200 staff in Ireland over the next two years as part of the global push.

The company checks how products from its clients are being sold over the internet – from their availability to how the goods are advertised on e-commerce sites like Amazon and Tesco’s virtual store.

That information can then be used to tweak the online selling process to help suppliers offload more of their products. In return, it charges up to $20,000 (€17,600) per retailer it analyses as part of its service.

Clavis’s software is already used by the world’s 10 largest manufacturers of consumer packaged goods, including Unilever, Nestlé and Mondelēz.

The company, previously known as Clavis Technology, has previously raised money from investors including Dublin venture-capital firm Delta Partners, Enterprise Ireland and millionaire Irish software entrepreneur Jim Mountjoy.

If you're considering implementing a mystery shopper program for your company, or would like to join us as a mystery shopper, we'd love to have you join us!
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Everyone Says They Listen to Their Customers—Here’s How to Really Do It

Almost everyone in the luxury service industry talks about “listening to the voice of the customer.” But listening is not the same as understanding. How you listen, and to whom you listen, is critical. Even a smart, high-end business can be led astray by misunderstanding the strengths and weaknesses of different customer feedback channels.

In this piece, I’ll lay out a few of the strengths and shortcomings of a few of the more common channels, based on my experience as global director of guest experience and innovation at the Dorchester Collection of luxury hotels.
Mystery shopper ratings

One ubiquitous tool for evaluating the quality of the customer experience in service industries is the mystery shopper. The mystery shopper plays the role of a customer, evaluating service on a checklist of criteria. With these checklists, mystery shoppers measure compliance to a set of standards related to physical attributes and service delivery. Your own company or an external evaluator (such as AAA or Forbes Five Star) may set these standards. Mystery shoppers are best for measuring efficiency — but not experience.

One checklist measure in the hospitality industry, for instance, is how promptly a guest is greeted upon arrival in the lobby, and whether she is greeted by name. But in this era of heightened sensitivity to privacy, does that always make sense? Suppose we’re talking about a luxury hotel guest who is a paparazzi-shy celebrity? A mystery shopper report would never alert me to the receptionist who had the good sense not to speak that guest’s name out loud.

A mystery shopper’s report is an important tool to help us deliver efficient service. But it’s equally important for my team to remember that a checklist, which tends to reward repetitive behaviors, cannot encompass everything we hope to be.
Opinion surveys

This is the easiest feedback channel to misinterpret, for luxury businesses and others. Results are best when it’s a scientific survey built on a proven customer-engagement methodology. One survey we recently did helped us distinguish between what business and leisure travelers look for in a hotel. It told us that we needed to work on winning back a greater proportion of business travelers as leisure guests, and positioned us to increase that by 6% over the following six months.

However, beware the opposite. A quick online survey (à la Survey Monkey) can set a luxury organization into fire-fighting mode about a one-off problem that’s not a true trend. Also, this data can be interpreted — and manipulated easily – by managers, to fit any agenda.
Social media feedback

Many businesses track Twitter and Facebook as measures of how well they are doing on customer service. For luxury brands, social media posts serve one main purpose — as online postcards.

When we looked closely, we found our guests most often use these channels to brag that they have stayed with us. What can we do with that sort of feedback? A lot. These insights don’t tell us about our customer service performance, but they can inform our marketing and customer experience strategies. For example, we see meal pictures showing up frequently on Instagram. So a question we can ask about a luxury room service meal is, is the presentation Instagram-worthy?

Looking at a series of posts from customers can also remind us of what differentiates us from our competitors: afternoon tea at The Dorchester and the soufflés at The Beverly Hills. At Hotel Plaza Athénée in Paris, for instance, guests find a high-end fluffy robe and slippers – with a twist. The slippers have red soles, like Christian Louboutin shoes. We learned via social posts that guests love this touch (especially those who remember Carrie Bradshaw’s fashionable stay there during the last two episodes of Sex and the City).

Social and review posts can also deliver “aha” moments about competitors’ offerings. For example, are luxury hotels delivering the same items – say cake and champagne – to special occasion guests? If so, you can strive for something more distinctive.

Social media is best for discovering what customers really value about their luxury experience with you. This information shapes customer experience strategy. Of course, they can also provide early warning signals that service has slipped. If your social media posts read like comment cards, that’s an alarm bell.



Review sites

In our industry, it is a common misperception that the review sites are used only to find deals. That has led some luxury service providers to discount them. True, not everyone on a review site will be your target customer. However, we’ve learned that many luxury shoppers use sites such as TripAdvisor to validate their choices prior to making a final decision, and browse our reviews and those of our direct competitors. That’s a customer we certainly want to win, so our managers respond to TripAdvisor reviews. Sometimes, this also presents a bonus opportunity to turn a one-time guest into a repeat customer.

Sites such as TripAdvisor can also help identify gaps in what you think is important to customers vs. what customers say is important. While surveys only tell us what we think we want to know and social posts often showcase the best highlights of a guest experience, review sites highlight our blind spots. And when customer reviews include images, they show our products and services through our customers’ eyes, not how professional photographers pose and light them for our website. This can be a reality check for us.

They can also help you look into your competition’s customer experience. Ask this key question: What do you have that customers love — and your competitors lack?
First-hand observations

It’s also valuable to learn when your own eyes trump all. One of the most powerful and often underappreciated tools for improving service and performance is direct observation. Sit in the lobby and see how staff members greet guests, how traffic flows through registration, and how well people work together. Someone in the luxury car business could apply the same principle to seeing what really goes on in the showroom, or in the sales manager’s office.

Luxury innovations usually come from understanding and addressing new needs. For instance, while sitting in the lobby of The Dorchester, members of my innovation team observed guests walk to the theater desk to book tickets for a West End show, and then go to the Concierge Desk to arrange for dinner reservations and transportation. Why, they asked, should guests have to go to two desks to arrange one evening? Now the theater desk staff make all the arrangements a guest might need. I am not sure we would have discovered that less-than-seamless service issue any other way than by sitting in the lobby and watching.

While auditing and measuring the customer experience, remember the ultimate goal is to gather information that helps deliver a level of customer service that differentiates your business. Do not expect technology-driven and repetitive checklist-style evaluations to find it for you.

 

SOURCE: Harvard Business Review

Google Will Use Mystery Shoppers Very Soon in Your Search Results

Google is starting to make it easier to find plumbers, locksmiths, cleaners, and other home service workers. It's rolling out a new type of search ad today that'll place listings for these services at the top of relevant search result pages, although only around the San Francisco Bay Area for now. The listings include a phone number for the business, customer ratings, basic details on their services, and a photo of someone who represents the company. The idea is that you can now just search for "lock repair" and immediately get a locksmith's number, rather than having to look through search results — or, you know, turn to another competitor like Amazon.

But keep in mind that these aren't people working for Google, nor are they necessarily recommended by Google: these are paid ads for local companies. That said, Google does have a slight hand in curation here. Google requires that every company go through background checks, get properly licensed, and obtain insurance, according to The Wall Street Journal. Google will also use mystery shoppers to check in on their performance. The ads are only open to plumbers, locksmiths, cleaners, and handyworkers for now — and again, only in the San Francisco Bay Area — but this is also just the start of what appears to be a much larger effort from Google to compete with the many tech companies already in this space.

SOURCE: The Verge 

If you're considering implementing a mystery shopper program for your company, or would like to join us as a mystery shopper, we'd love to have you join us!
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MFs Try Out 'Mystery Shoppers' to Keep Lid on Mis-Selling

To check mis-selling of mutual funds and ensure compliance with norms, fund houses have begun using 'mystery shoppers' to catch errant agents and also to get feedback from investors.

Mystery shoppers are typically representatives of fund houses who pose as ordinary investors while dealing with mutual fund distributors.

Executives at various mutual funds said 'mystery shopping' method can be an effective way to check mis-selling, which has always been a major concern for the industry.

However, the system can succeed only if it is done by independent entities and their analysis needs to be taken seriously.

"The 'mystery shoppers' method can give some kind of essence. It can help in providing you what is happening on the ground. We at Reliance Mutual Fund are already using this technique to get feedback from investors," Reliance Capital Asset Management CEO Sundeep Sikka said.

Sikka, who is also Chairman of the industry body AMFI (Association of Mutual Funds in India), said different fund houses are using different techniques in these areas.


Quantum Mutual Fund CEO Jimmy Patel too said: "Mystery shoppers can be used to reduce mis-selling in mutual funds... It can become successful provided that these are done by independent entities and we take their result very seriously."

Mis-selling mainly occurs on account of AUM (Assets Under Management) race where quantity gets predominance over quality. This is also one of the reasons why retail investors generally fight shy of investing in mutual funds, Patel said.

Explaining the benefits of the method, Baroda Pioneer AMC COO and CFO Kiran Deshpande said: "Mystery shoppers can help detect whether the recommended funds are appropriately sold to a particular investor."

"The distributor/manufacturer will not only get more watchful over their sales practices and processes, but will continuously invest in building capabilities and skills to address the needs of different investors as suited to their risk appetite," he added.

Regulator Sebi has defined mis-selling as sale of units of a mutual fund scheme by any person, directly or indirectly, by making a false or misleading statement, concealing or omitting material facts of the scheme, hiding risk factors and not taking reasonable care to ensure suitability of the scheme to the buyer.

Source: Business Standard