Ok, I know the title sounds a
little creepy, but fret not; the truth is much less scary than you think. In
this latest blog post, I write about a recent experience I underwent with one
of the leading unisex apparel retailers in the Middle East – the Giordano
International Fashions Group.
Giordano has over 1800 retail
outlets in 40 countries across 5 continents – given their massive scale of
operation, I was fortunate to cultivate a contact at Giordano Middle East. Having
‘sowed the seeds’ (so to speak), I was very determined to engage with them in
order to understand what makes them tick.
When I met with their HR head, a
lovely lady named Kashmira, and spoke about my intentions to work with them on
a short-term basis, she was initially sceptical – and with good reason. Here I
was, an MBA student in an alien land
coming at her out of the blue asking for an opportunity that did not exist (Of
course, the fact that I wasn’t looking for any sort of monetary compensation
didn’t hurt, but even so). It took a little bit of cajoling, but the moment I
uttered the words ‘mystery shopping’ she seemed hooked – more on that in a
minute. I had made my first sell and I was feeling good. Little was I to know
that I would enjoy the experience more than I had cared for.
Imagine being asked to go out to
malls all day, try on different articles of clothing, shop at a few places with
money that is not yours with the added bonus of having the licence to act
stupid/indignant/offended as a prelude to creating a ruckus at any store of
your liking. Sounds like your dream job, ladies? Well this, in a nutshell, is
what mystery or ‘ghost’ shopping is all about. It may sound trivial the way I
describe it, but more and more customer-facing & service-oriented
organizations in the world today, especially large retail chains like Giordano,
are beginning to understand the importance and the associated benefits of
religiously following the adage, “Customer is King”.
What exercises like ‘Mystery Shopping’
allows organizations to accomplish is to evaluate their service offering from a
neutral, un-biased perspective. One of the major drawbacks in any service
offering is its variability – services are rendered by humans, not machines. A
sales store clerk who seems warm and inviting today may sport a cold shoulder
the next time you visit the store. This makes evaluating such services
extremely dicey. Nevertheless, ghost shopping can help iron out the chinks in
the service armoury of major retail chains by providing organizations with the
information they crave the most - consumer feedback (no wonder Kashmira seemed
so interested).
Make no mistake though; mystery shopping
is no bed of roses to walk on. Having worked out the details of the project, I
was to be a part of a team tasked with visiting 22 different retail outlets of
Giordano, in the three most populous Emirates of the UAE – Dubai, Abu Dhabi and
Sharjah. Now here’s the funny thing: there’s a marked difference in our demeanour
between when we shop at leisure to when we are asked to shop at leisure. Apart from having to notice a million
different things at each store – right from observing if the sales store clerk
was properly groomed to checking if the fitting rooms had sufficient hooks to
hang clothes from – we also had to ‘perform’ a set of transactions or 'scenarios'
at selected stores – yes, one of them was to pick a fight with the store clerk.
Honestly, with all the observation I was doing, I felt like a modern day
Sherlock Holmes after a while.
At the end of it all, the project
proved to be an eye-opener – both for Giordano and for me. While they were made
aware of the frailties in their service, I was presented with a unique
opportunity to understand how theory was actually put into practice in the real
world. A win-win. Of course, the free T-Shirt I got for my troubles didn’t hurt
either.
