Mystery Shoppers Ltd

Mystery Shoppers Ltd says it completes about 9,500 assessments a month from a panel of more than 350,000 shoppers across the UK and Ireland, and its programmes for smaller businesses start at a minimum order of £1,000 plus VAT spread over 12 months.

What a franchise network gets from it

The firm has a page written for franchisors. Shoppers test each franchised site plus the channels around it: contact centres, websites and landing pages, social media and live chat. Results go to head office and to the franchisee, so a site can fix a gap or be credited for good work. You can build your own procedures into the assessment form, which lets a franchisee jump from a low score straight to the standard or refresher it relates to, without you writing separate training material.

Franchise results it has published

• A care home franchise found only 53% of staff followed up families after a visit; after recorded good examples were shared across the network the rate reached 73%.
• A global dessert franchisor used first-wave findings to write a four-week training scheme into new franchise contracts; the share of shoppers who would recommend the brand rose from 35% to 73%.
• A vehicle rental network had all 120 sites visited and found 56% using out-of-date email templates, with the correct files sent to each manager.

Channels, audits and reporting

Assessments cover face-to-face visits (standard, audio or video recorded), telephone calls, including scoring of calls you have already recorded, websites, social media, email and live chat, plus overt and covert audits. Results sit in its MSL Online portal, which lists trend charts, a coaching plan dashboard and unlimited users with tiered access. Its TellUsFirst tool collects real customer feedback by QR code, website widget or emailed smiley and is priced per survey rather than per response, so a network can add live feedback by location.

Who runs it

Paul Grafton, a certified management consultant who previously managed cabin crew training at British Airways, started the company in 1991 and is now chairman. His daughter Sophie Grafton is managing director, with Matt Pepperell as director of client services, Dani Platt over business operations and Wendy Pompe over business development. The headquarters is in Holsworthy, Devon, with an office in London, and the firm says it is a company partner of the Market Research Society and a member of the Mystery Shopping Professionals Association.

Other options in this category

The customer feedback and mystery shopping hub also lists MCE Mystery Shopping, an Edinburgh firm whose shoppers visit as ordinary customers across England, Scotland and Wales, and ABa Quality Monitoring, a family-run Stockport business running programmes since 1990. If you need brand inspections and royalty checks rather than covert visits, Venners in Harlow offers those. Related hubs cover compliance, audit and reporting and wider business services for UK franchise networks. Our guides explain how franchisors keep standards consistent and how to run a franchisee satisfaction survey.

Source: mystery-shoppers.co.uk

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