Royal College of General Practitioners: Mystery Shopping

RCGP wanted to evaluate the level of service and response times members received from the College, in order to establish how and where improvements could be made.

They decided that mystery shopping would be the most effective way to achieve their aim and that this would take place across 28 departments within the RCGP.

Chord proposed an approach that included contact with the 28 departments by a combination of phone and email, under the persona of eight different GP profiles. These profiles created realistic but fictitious individuals who were all included on the RCGP member database.

In order that all mystery shopping contact appeared to be from genuine doctors, mobile telephones were commissioned for use and email alias accounts were set up.

The service levels measured included:

• Making contact and getting through – including call pick up and voicemail
• Initial contact – including greeting and caller verification
• Dealing with the query – including collecting information, problem solving, call handling and tone
• Call closing – including ending the call and follow up

The primary objective was to engage with 28 RCGP departments and complete a specific number of questionnaires.

This was achieved by:

1. Submitting specific and relevant queries via phone and email to each of the 28 departments. A specific number of calls and emails to each department over the shopper period were pre-agreed with RCGP.
2. Grading responses to queries according to a pre-determined semantic scale of 1-3 (1 = Poor; 2 = Good; 3 = Exceptional). Additional qualitative comments were also captured.
3. Recording and reporting valuable feedback about how queries are handled by each department.

During the mystery shopper period Chord:

• Made 69 telephone calls
• Sent 50 emails

To provide actionable insight, Chord presented a detailed 46 page report.

The report included graphs and charts for each service area, and analysed service level findings and recommendations for each department, grouped by directorate.

To help RCGP prioritise its continuous improvement effectively, the report highlighted for each department the main areas for which there was:

• Good service
• Room for improvement

The report also made specific recommendations for improvements in individual departments including:

• Training
• Consistent live call answering and query-handling
• Improved multi-channel query handling
• Member verification
• Response service levels
• Consistent voicemail messaging

Chord has also supported RCGP with member retention, lapsed member calls and welcome calls.