Inspecting what you expect

It is a cliché, but one that very much holds when it comes to the world of customer service: ‘inspect what you expect’. Charities have service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) aplenty for their supporter services and fundraising teams but, alongside all these internal measurement tools, it is critical to gather a more nuanced understanding of how supporters are experiencing interactions with your charity. Numbers can only take us so far, and getting under the skin of even the most basic interactions allows organisations to inspect in more detail exactly why and how they are meeting – or not meeting, as may be the case – their expected levels of service, and – importantly – allow them to build on this evidence to make change and drive improvement.

Mystery shopping is a type of market research that uses a secret shopper to act as a true customer to evaluate the customer experience in-person, over the phone, or online.

THINK has been running mystery shopping programmes for charities for over 13 years, and with good reason. Mystery shopping is a really useful market research tool to capture insights into the entire donation or enquiry process, right from how easy the supporter found the information they needed, through to what they thought of the follow-up communications received. It focuses on more than a Net Promoter Score (NPS) or satisfaction score, and provides details into a wide range of areas, such as the tone of voice of the call handler, how well and quickly complaints were responded to, and what format of legacy pack is landing best with potential supporters. It is a really rich and detailed source of information that can be tailored to explore a range of scenarios – both online and in-person.

The list of benefits to mystery shopping is pretty vast, but a few key reasons that so many charities undertake this exercise, either via use of an external agency or mystery shopping themselves, are covered here.

Firstly, it provides charities with an opportunity to receive an unbiased view of both how well their processes are performing and the experience that customers are receiving. Mystery supporters are asked to act like real supporters, even though they may not support your cause in real life. They are therefore not biased by a determination to see the best in your website or call handling because they love the cause – their feedback is frank and honest about their experience, good or otherwise.

Mystery shopping gives charities the opportunity to focus in on specific activities or channels, and tailor the areas they want shoppers to explore to match their requirements. For example, this year THINK mystery shoppers have explored the new e-commerce site of one charity, reviewing their experience of using particular website functions and purchase options. Another THINK client is reviewing the membership offer at its nationwide sites, and shoppers are undertaking a series of repeat visits over the course of 12 months to track changes over time. We have also run a series of rapid in-campaign mystery shopping projects, with shoppers reviewing their experience of responding to campaign collateral. By focused tailoring of requirements, charities have been able to gather campaign or activity-specific data – both qualitative and quantitative – that they can use to supplement their quality control measurements, feed into SLAs and enhance training.

Depending on the sort of mystery shopping undertaken, there is also the opportunity to gather insights into how your charity is performing compared to others. The THINK Stewardship Tracker has been running since 2010, and we have a vast databank of performance metrics from more than 50 charities. Our bi-annual benchmarking exercise gives members the opportunity to compare and discuss performance across a range of areas, from cash and regular giving, to legacy enquiries and complaints handling.

The focus of THINK’s work in the mystery shopping space is via online, telephone and postal channels, but of course there are plenty of charities that use mystery shopping for their face-to-face activities, so I wanted to say a quick word on this too. The Chartered Institute of Fundraising (CIoF) manages a dedicated mystery shopping programme to support fundraising that happens on private sites. Its most recent reports (Sept 2022 – Feb 2023) indicate that 93.9% of experiences were rated as excellent or good. Additionally, the Institute of Fundraising Compliance has created a reference guide, The Mystery Shopping Terms of Reference, that should be consulted when engaging suppliers to carry out this work for your charity.

There’s a huge amount more that can be said about the benefits and options that mystery shopping offers. However, all in all, mystery shopping can play an important role in helping charities to ‘inspect what they expect’ when it comes to customer service. It can shed light on issues you didn’t know existed, and is a really useful instrument in helping you discover your ‘unknown unknowns’.

Arani Mylvaganam, THINK’s Head of Intelligence
September 2023

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THINK’s research team can provide more information on mystery shopping, including how to go about conducting it in-house, so do reach out to Arani Mylvaganam, Head of THINK Intelligence (aranim@thinkcs.org), for a chat if you’d like to talk more.

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