Ilkley store manager Ian Jacques (left) and staff with Edwin Booth, chairman of Booths.
Booths supermarkets have been serving the north-west community with quality products and services for the past 150 years.
After several years of having a customer comment week at each store it was decided that Booths needed more frequent feedback regarding how its customers perceive stores in a consistent and unbiased way.
Shopper Anonymous were chosen due to their experience of running large scale mystery shopping programs across Australia and New Zealand for numerous independent supermarket groups.
Their mystery shoppers visit each store and tea room on a monthly basis and prepare a detailed report after their visit. Displayed in each store for the staff to see, the reports detail all aspects of their trip including presentation, availability, cleanliness and customer service.
One of the key benefits of the Booths mystery shopping programme is its ability to bring service consistency to multi site groups. Jonathan Roskell, the Regional Manager for Booths, one of the UK’s leading family owned supermarket groups explains:
“When we began the Shopper Anonymous programme back in 2007, it became quite apparent that while we delivered good service at a local level there was inconsistency between the 25 supermarkets and 10 tea rooms. This meant that our values were being represented in different ways.”
“While we want localised great service we also needed to ensure the key service messages were consistent. The “gap” in the standards was 40% between the stores following the first round of mystery shops. After 12 months we had narrowed that to 22%. We are now consistently tracking at 8%. This is particularly helpful if staff move stores as they can fit in with ease appreciating the service standards expected. This, coupled with our reward programme, ensures that all of the team knows that any shopper could be from Shopper Anonymous!”
In 2011 Shopper Anonymous were awarded the mystery shopping contracts for Booths again after undergoing a competitive tender process.
