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Section 4 Techniques and Tools

Mystery shopping - Aberdeenshire

Aberdeenshire Council undertook a corporate mystery shopper’s exercise in 2001. A recent survey had suggested there was an issue about difficulties in telephoning the council. Mystery shopping was used to find out more about typical experiences of telephoning the council.

An independent consultant was used to undertake a small scale telephone exercise over a few weeks. The scenarios to be used were developed by asking for FAQs from service areas in the council and also any topics that they wanted to know more about. Local people who sounded like typical customers were recruited by the consultancy to make around 300 telephone calls.

Both staff and the trade unions were involved in the decision to conduct the mystery shopper exercise and knew that this was going to happen, although not the details of exactly when and where the calls would be made.

This approach generated useful performance data on how calls were being handled at the time; both quantitative data such as how long it took to get through and qualitative data such as the way the query was dealt with.

The information gathered in this way was fed into a working group of front line staff supported by a senior manager. This led to the production of guidance for staff on how to use the telephone system better.

The Council was pleased with how the exercise had gone. It was fairly quick, relatively simple, very focused and cost effective. Some staff felt ‘spied on’; this is an issue that any such exercise needs to tackle with care.

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