Our resident involvement and customer service team recently worked together with residents to establish a new mystery shopping programme.
Almost 70 residents expressed an interest in becoming mystery shoppers, with six members recruited to join the shop this time. These residents called our customer services team over the course of four weeks with a range of pre-agreed scenarios and queries. After their calls, they let us know how it went, checking staff did everything they should, but also letting us know how they felt about the whole experience.
Once the results were in there was great news- our mystery shoppers told us that our customer service staff are “very helpful and informative”, “lovely and friendly” and 100% of mystery shoppers said that the customer services advisors they spoke to were polite and courteous on the call.
We’re proud of this, but the mystery shop also identified that we need to work on. We know our phone system occasionally lets us down, and this is something we are working with our supplier to resolve. No-one should be cut off during a call or have connection issues. We’ll also be reminding staff not to use plain English – which means avoiding overly technical language or jargon - and summarise at the end of a call so that residents know they’ve been listened to and understood.
One of our mystery shoppers said: “I very much enjoyed it, I enjoyed the chance to do something productive for myself and the community.”
Kim Parkins, Head of Customer Experience, summarised how important it is to work with residents to make improvements: “Residents are the people contacting our customer services team every day, so they’re in the best position to let us know how we can improve. We were overwhelmed that so many residents wanted to get involved with this and really welcome their positive comments and constructive suggestions- we’ll be taking all their feedback on board so we can deliver the best possible experience to everyone who contacts us.”
We’ll be running more regular mystery shops next year so there’ll be other chances for all those interested to get involved. A huge thank you to those residents that completed the shop this time round and we’re looking forward to working with residents again to continuously improve the service you receive when you contact us!