HOED Holdings - About Us
Established in 1986 HOED Holdings (ACN 002 898 991 - ABN 37 002 898 991) trading as HOED Mystery Shopping is a member of the Association of Market and Social Research Organisations (AMSRO). All staff are employed under an Australian Market Research Workplace Agreement, a copy of which is held at our St Leonards office. Our Managing Director and our Sales Director are members of the Market Research Society of Australia (MRSA) the major professional organisation of the research industry in Australia. Its Code of Professional Behaviour requires high standards of competence, ethics and social responsibility be used when conducting assignments.
HOED has access to over 15,000 Mystery Shoppers and working with over three hundred different organisations throughout Australia, HOED has Interviewer Quality Control Australia (IQCA) accreditation in Mystery Shopping (Audits and Observational Studies). HOED Mystery Shopping abides by the Quality Standards set down by Interviewer Quality Control Australia (IQCA). HOED has commenced a process to achieve accreditation under another International Quality Standard (ISO 9002).
In 2008 HOED Mystery Shopping was bought by the STW Group ( http://www.stwgroup.com.au/ ). STW is Australia's largest Marketing and Communications group comprising over 70 individual businesses that are involved in advertising, market research, communications and associated businesses. In 2009 HOED and another Mystery Shopping company called CBS were merged and the new organisation is now one of the largest Mystery Shopping companies in Australia boasting a shopper network of over 15,000 shoppers.
We are located at St Leonards sharing offices with a number of other STW companies. Please feel free to drop by and say hello if you are in the area or visiting Sydney for personal or business reasons.
The HOED Service Offering and the Mystery Shopping process
In addition to Mystery Shopping HOED offers a range of services including conducting audits of all types at client sites, conducting INTERNET and telephone surveys. The services are all based around the need to have someone visit a Client site and conduct an activity defined by the Client.
We will focus on Mystery Shopping in this training manual as it comprises the majority of our business and basically defines the nature of all of our activities. Specific training as well as clearly defined instructions and questionnaires will be provided to you when you have accepted an assignment.
Lets get some basic terminology out of the way.
An ASSIGNMENT is basically a single piece of work you do for us and that we pay you for doing. An ASSIGNMENT's details are included in a JOB PACK, that is the documents that define the assignment, these two documents are a QUESTIONNAIRE (that tells you what you need to ask) and the JOB BRIEF (that tells you how to do the job).
A Mystery Shopper visits a client’s business and enquires about a product or service, allowing staff to recommend a product/service and follow through with the enquiry. The Mystery Shopper observes the store and staff presentation, initial impression, courtesy, greeting, product knowledge and the selling skills of the client's staff.
Immediately after the visit (and well out of sight) the Mystery Shopper makes notes before the information is forgotten. The client's staff must not know an Aassignment is taking place to ensure that you receive the same service as any other shopper.
Upon returning home the Mystery Shopper completes the Questionnaire that captures the quality of the service they have experienced. The Questionnaire is electronically returned to HOED where it is quality checked. The answers are processed by a computer that produces reports that indicates the customer service skills of the client's staff on a percentage basis. The client's staff aim to score 100% or whatever the client has set as a benchmark.
By making their enquiries incognito, Mystery Shoppers can provide clients with a realistic picture of the service offered to their customers on a day-to-day basis.
How Mystery Shopping works for Clients
Mystery Shopping reports are used by clients as training tools to develop and improve the customer service skills of their staff.
Clients establish the performance standards to be used in the assignment aligned to their training, reward and recognition programs, or incentive schemes. HOED Mystery Shopping creates a Questionnaire that reflect these standards and gives each question a score. Mystery Shoppers assess the client’s business on the basis of these questions. A Survey with every question achieving ‘yes’ or full points has a potential score of 100%. Survey results identify customer service ‘gaps’, represented by the difference between the scores achieved and their potential.
Staff are told they will be "mystery shopped" but not told when, by whom or the scenarios. The surveys are not meant to punish or intimidate; results are used constructively. Rewards are often given to staff who perform well. Goals are reinforced by on-going measurement of customer service and the monitoring of staff incentive schemes. Improved customer service ensures that customers will return and leads directly to increased sales.