Mystery shoppers out in force

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Around Australia, thousands of people are posing as customers, secretly rating the service they are getting.

They are the undercover consumer armies, trained to assess the treatment they get in all sorts of businesses: banks, supermarkets, department stores, telecommunications and IT companies, utilities and government departments.

And the latest mystery shopper ratings are pretty ugly.

Mark Ritson, associate professor of marketing at Melbourne Business School, has worked over the world as a consultant for leading companies, but he said the lack of competition in Australia and poor staff training has seen a rapid decline in service.

"Australia has the lowest levels of customer service, the worst I've ever seen," he said.

"Many of these Australian organisations are happy to take money from consumers but not happy to listen to them and to give them what they want.

"Companies in Australia treat customers with an enormous degree of ignorance and frankly treat them in a manner which is much lower than other organisations of similar size elsewhere in the world."

Paul van Veenendaal owns Customer Service Benchmarking, which measures businesses' quality of service and then gives the owners feedback about staff.

His mystery shopper teams sent emails with an easy, frequently asked question to 30 different telecommunications companies, banks and internet service providers to see when and how they would answer.

"The expectation with an email is that you get a response quickly within four hours from that company. The other expectation is that your question is answered in a polite and courteous manner and, thirdly, that there is a name and contact," he said.

Amazingly, almost 60 per cent of companies did not bother to reply to the email.
Of the companies that did answer, 80 per cent took more than two days to reply.

"The consumer is going to feel insulted," Mr van Veenendaal said.

The best and fastest email responses were from Telstra Mobile, BigPond and Westpac.

The worst and slowest were Vodaphone, Primus, Optus and ANZ bank.

The mystery shoppers also rang 30 telcos, ISPs and banks with a common question.

"When people ring an organisation they want to get through to someone quickly, they want to talk to someone that will listen, treat them politely and courteously and will have good understanding of their products and services and provide a clear resolution to your enquiry," Mr van Veenendaal said.

Telecommunications companies are the worst for telephone service, results showed.

To answer the phone, two companies out of five took longer than four minutes, the same result as one in five banks and one in eight ISPs.

GapBusters Worldwide employs 200,000 mystery shoppers globally.

When Phil Prosser's teams put three major discount department stores in Australia to the service test, one in two of his mystery shoppers were not satisfied.

"The price is important to get them in, but getting them back does come back to friendly staff providing great experience," he said.

"Bad news in customer service spreads fast and it spreads a lot faster than good news.

"A bad experience can result in one customer telling nine other people about that experience, whereas when it is a great experience, they are likely to tell five other people."

Related links

GAPbuster Worldwide
Customer Service Benchmarking Australia