Are banks using Mystery Shopping in a similar manner to gas stations and the QSR industry?
Gina: Mystery Shopping has widespread use throughout the financial services industry, from retail banking to insurance to investment banking. They use Mystery Shopping to monitor compliance of their staff. Programs run the gamut from conducting a simple transaction, such as cashing a check, to inquiring about specific bank products, to more complex “transactions” such as working with a financial adviser and assessing whether or not they’re offering products to meet the customer’s needs. We do a fairly unique program for a large retail bank, where they not only collect customer satisfaction data at the financial center level, but we also designed a program to recruit shoppers to actually become customers. The shoppers actually open an account and then we track their experiences throughout a typical customer life cycle. Over several months, shoppers visit the banks to conduct teller transactions, ATM transactions, and make product inquiries. They track materials that are received at home
