Shedding Light on a Mystery
By Murray McNeill, Business Reporter

Cychowski (left) says mystery shoppers inspect
service from workers like Perkin's Tara Moony.
In a variation of the proverbial fly in the soup, a customer goes
to a family restaurant for dinner and discovers a dead fly in his
salad.
In another case, a hotel guest mentions to an inquisitive bellhop
that he and his wife are celebrating their anniversary.
A few hours later a bouquet of flowers and a gift basket are delivered
to their room, and the hotel manager calls to congratulate them.
What's the connection? In both cases, the customers involved were
"mystery shoppers" - people hired to pose as customers
to see if a retailer's staff training and customer service programs
are producing the desired results.
Retail industry officials say that while mystery shopping programs
have been around in some form or another sice the 1950s, their use
has grown substantially in the last 5 years. Increased competition
and higher consumer expectations have prompted many retailers to
focus more time and resources on establishing and maintaining a
high standard of customer service.
Increased demand for these services is reflected in the growing
number of companies that are offering them. Mark Michelson, president
of Atlanta-based Mystery Shopping Providers Association, said about
15 companies in Canada offer mystery shopping services, where 15
years ago there were perhaps two.
Winnipeg-based Probe Research Inc., got into the business about
a year ago, and now has a pool of about 30 people, ranging from
university students to retirees, that it uses as shoppes.
Rosemary Fletcher, Probe's director of consumer research and evaluation,
said although their services have been used mostly by financial
institutions, they can be tailored to a variety of retail operations.
Helen, a 40-year old "semi-retired" Winnipegger, is one
of Probe's mystery shoppers. She has to remain anonymous to continue
to do her job. Helen said she's visited eight to 10 financial institutions
in the last four to five months, posing as a customer interested
in obtaining a mortgage or a car loan.
Among things she watches for are how staff greet her, how long
she has to wait for service, and how effective the loans officer
is in meeting her needs.
"It can be a little bit nerve-racking," she admitted.
"But it can be fun and it can be interesting."
Winnipeg entrepreneur Brenda Andre tried out a mystery shopping
program for the first time last summer at her nine Perkins Family
Restaurant and Bakery franchises in Western Canada, including five
in Winnipeg. She said she was so thrilled with the results, she's
making it an annual thing.
"It really keeps everybody on their toes," Andre added.
Lissa Cychowski, Andre's director of marketing, said the program
they use has mystery diners visit each restaurant on a number of
occasions between June 1 and Aug. 31. The firm that provides the
service usually forwards an evaluation report within 72 hours of
each visit.
Cychowski said the restaurants' staff don't know who the mystery
diners are, or when they are going to show up. The kinds of things
the diners look for include how long it takes staff to greet customers
after they enter the restaurant, whether they greet them with a
smile, how long it takes to be seated, how long they have to wait
for their meal, whether their servers ask if they'd like a beverage
or dessert and how clean the premises are, including the washrooms.
Cychowski said the importance of good customer service can't be
emphasized enough.
"Your can have the best food and the best decor, but if you
don't have that customer service, you have nother," she added.
Diane Brisebois, president and chief executive officer of the Retail
Council of Canada, said customer service has become a big issue
with retailers in the 1990s because of rising consumer expectations
and the expanding choice of products and services available to the
public these days.
"If you want to survive in this retail environment, which
is very competitive, you have to pay attention wo customer service,"
Brisebois added.
It's also critical that retailers tailor their customer service
programs to the wants and needs of their clientele, she noted. For
example, if they have the kind of retail operation that caters to
consumers who want to get in and out of the store as quickly as
possible, they provide a different kind of customer service that
the retailer that catesr to consumers who want to come in and learn
as much as they can about a product before they buy it.
Probe's Fletcher and David Lipton, president of a Toronto-based
mystery shopping services firm - Sensors Quality Management Inc.
- encourage their retail clients to use their programs to reward
employees who provide a high level of customer service, rather than
just focus on mistakes and weaknesses. Programs run that way are
more likely to win the support of employees.
Lipton - it was his mystery shopper who found the fly in the salad
and received the gifts from the hotel - said Canadian retailers
and consumers began focusing more on customer service after Wal-Mart
moved into Canada in 1994. He noted there was a lot of publicity
at the time about how the U.S. retailing giants put a lot of emphasis
on customer service.
He added that the kinds of retailers who use his six-year old firm's
mystery shopping services include hotels, restaurants, retail stores,
and doctor's offices.
Copyright © Winnipeg Free Press, 1999
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