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Section
D:
Choosing The Method, A Guide to Community Consultation and Research Methods
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Mystery Customers
| Summary | This involves someone posing as a customer and assessing
the service they receive in detail. The contact could be face to face, by phone, by post or a combination of these. |
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| Examples | Young people with disabilities have acted as mystery customers to Council services and given detailed feedback on the service they received. |
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| Useful for | Evaluating the quality of front line services. Providing
detailed information on a service. |
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| Not useful | In most cases it is not practical to use a large
enough number of mystery customers to make this technique statistically
representative. To assess some services a ‘real’ case
is needed e.g. a planning application. It is important that the exercise is presented to staff positively and that good as well as poor practice is highlighted. If staff are not told about the exercise they may see it as underhand. Alternatively, if they are told, this could influence their behaviour. |
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| Equal Rights | The “mystery customers” need to reflect
the make up of actual service users. Top |
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| Costs | If done in-house and staff are trained, this method
can be fairly cheap. A reciprocal arrangement could be made with another organisation to reduce costs. . |
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| Time Scale | 2-3 months |
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| Contact | Richard Smith | 01274 433839 |
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| Section C | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 | Section E |
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Introduction and Framework Section A Section B Section C Section D Section E |
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