Secret service
On a gloomy Monday evening in late February an unlikely group of people gather in an office in central London. They vary in age from 20 to 50-something and come from different backgrounds.
Yet they have one thing in common. They are about to become mystery customers, having all been lured by an advertisement in a national newspaper with the irresistible offer of: "Would you like to eat and drink for free?"
The aspiring assessors, meeting for their one and only training course in how to be a hotel or restaurant critic, have already undergone rigorous selection procedures by Scher Reporting, a recently formed division of Scher Associates.
An advertisement in a national newspaper might attract 500 to 600 enquiries. Of these, only 30 might make it to be mystery customers.
Of the applications, Alex Hazell, head of Scher Reporting, can discount a large percentage at the outset. "We only accept people who eat or drink out on a regular basis. If they only go to a restaurant once every six months then they're no use to us," he says.
Similarly, would-be assessors have to satisfy socio-economic and, as the scheme is national, geographic criteria, to give as much choice as possible.
Scher Reporting has about 1,000 names of would-be assessors on its database, although only around 200 have been trained as assessors.
At the beginning of the course each assessor receives a "How to be a Mystery Customer" instruction manual. The term mystery customers, it explains, is used to describe covert assessors employed to experience and report objectively on the service of a company or establishment.
For the company buying the service the scheme is claimed to:
Give a customer perception of an organisation
Obtain objective data
Allow consistent monitoring of performance over time
Compare regional and national outlets
Identify training needs
Act as a benchmark against competitors
Motivate staff
The next stage for the aspiring critics is to run through how the all-important questionnaire works. Questions are objective and should be easy to answer. Each organisation taking part in the scheme will specify the criteria they wish to see fulfilled, but for a typical four-star hotel these might include:
Were you acknowledged within 30 seconds of reaching the desk?
Did the reception staff acknowledge you with a smile?
Was your name used by the staff during the transaction?
Did the porter check the room before showing you in?
Did the porter leave without expecting a tip?
Was the room at a comfortable temperature?
Answers are either yes or no, with a column for non-applicable, which is used if the mystery guest does not have an accurate recall of the situation.
There is also a column for comments. It is essential, the manual explains, that comments are written wherever possible, positive as well as negative. In most cases, if the question is answered "no" then a written explanation is required.
After running through the manual, there follows a lengthy discussion among the assessors as to the difference between objective and subjective comments.
For example, the standard set by a hotel is: "The curtains in the bedroom should be in good repair." The answer "They were not up to my standards" is not acceptable. An objective response would be: "Curtains were tatty at the base."
The course also gives tips in amateur detective work. If an assessor is challenged it is suggested that he or she looks bemused and asks: "What is a mystery customer?" Wearing a watch on the inside of the wrist so that it does not appear obvious that timings are being recorded is also advised.
For those who might use the visit as a licence to go mad on the wine, the following advice is clearly stressed: alcohol impedes judgement and you need only one drink to assess this area of the operation!
Completed questionnaires have to be returned within 24 hours. In return, the assessor is reimbursed for the cost of the meal or overnight stay and paid £5 for every restaurant visit and £10 for every hotel visit.
A detailed report of the visit is provided for the company buying in the service. If visits are conducted on a regular basis information can be plotted on a graph so that any improvements can be noted.
Scher Reporting's costs vary according to the type of outlet and number of visits. But one to four hotel visits a year would cost around £105 per visit; five to 12 visits to a fast food outlet around £40; 13 to 36 visits to a restaurant about £48; and over 37 visits to a pub around £39. All prices are exclusive of VAT and expenses incurred during a trip as well as initial set-up costs, which will vary according to a customer's requirements.
Around 30 companies in the hospitality industry have already signed up for the scheme. Hazell refuses to name them, but says that they include a major hotel group, a London-based wine-bar group and a fast-developing café chain.
Hazell also encourages clients to tell their staff that a mystery visit will take place, but not to reveal when it will happen. "There's a certain caginess about the programme. Maybe it's the name, the secrecy. I like to steer away from mystery. Staff should know that the firm is participating to give them a chance for improvement."
For the would-be assessors, a gloomy Monday evening has been cheered up. They are now among the selected few and over the next year they will visit a restaurant, pub, fast-food outlet or hotel about once a month, gaining the enviable opportunity to eat and drink for free.
Early beginnings
Firms specialising in mystery customer programmes have been around for about 20 years. Originally from the USA, they started as a way of checking car franchises. They arrived in the UK about 10 years ago and were initially embraced by the banks.
Because of their covert nature it is difficult to estimate the size of the market, but it is thought that between £10m and £20m is spent on mystery customer programmes each year.
About 35 companies in the UK now offer some sort of mystery shopping service, but on the whole they cover a variety of fields rather than being specific to catering. So far, however, it has been the retail sector which has shown the most interest in the concept, with over 80% of businesses now using some form of mystery customer programme.
By comparison with its retail counterparts, the hospitality industry has been slow to participate. Companies such as Burger King, McDonald's, Bass, Ansells and Forte are on record as embracing the concept, with Burger King even displaying the results of its mystery customer exercise on noticeboards in individual restaurants.
For smaller operators, though, mystery customer schemes are still in their infancy. In boom times a thriving industry did not see the same need to market itself and find a point of difference over its competitors, as is clearly the case today.
According to a recent study in the USA, 96% of unhappy customers do not complain, they simply never return. A survey closer to home by market research firm Mintel, found that one in five customers who have had a bad experience in a hotel or catering establishment tell 20 others of their experiences.
Consequently mystery customers are increasingly viewed as a way of identifying service faults before they start to erode hard-earned customer bases.
