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Section 4 Techniques and Tools

Mystery shopping using tenants – Aberdeen City Council

Aberdeen City Council has recently undertaken a mystery shopping exercise using tenants as the mystery shoppers. They see this is as part of their wider tenant participation strategy and were successful in obtaining a grant from Communities Scotland to support the exercise. The exercise was overseen by a Steering Group that has tenant representatives on it and which has support from the Tenant Participation Advisory Service (TPAS).

In order to recruit mystery shoppers, flyers were sent to all tenants and this identified 30-40 new people that were interested. Mystery shoppers get a £10 voucher for making four calls or one office visit in person. Their expenses are also met.

Seven tenants took part and undertook around 38 mystery shopping visits to offices and over 300 telephone calls. The exercise used 14 different scenarios based on issues concerned with repairs, allocations, homelessness, tenant participation, customer services and the Right to Repair. These were made up by the Steering Group.

Two separate focus groups of tenants (not those involved in the mystery shopping exercise) and front line staff are also conducted to discuss and validate the data received from the exercise. These were facilitated by an external consultant.

The exercise went well and the council think that this approach has advantages as it is based on real tenants’ views and experience. Whilst there has been some suspicion, most people in the council are now supportive of the approach.

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