What is mystery shopping?
Mystery shopping involves you, our customer, testing our services to check we are doing what we say we will.
Volunteer tenants and residents check and test our services and the services of Six Town Housing.
We have been successfully testing housing services this way since 2004. There are currently 25 trained volunteers involved.
How we test our services
Our volunteers pose as 'real customers' in the following ways.
- Visiting our reception areas to make face-to-face enquiries.
- Phoning us to make enquiries.
- Inspecting our housing to assess the standard. For example, empty properties, flats and homeless hostels.
- Assessing our website for ease of use.
What we do with the findings
Twice a year, volunteers and staff discuss previous exercises, consult on future exercises and thank volunteers for their time and effort.
This helps to show us where improvements and changes can be made to make services better for people.
Working with our neighbours
We work with service providers from Rochdale, Bolton, Salford, Stockport and Wigan to carry out mystery shopping of communal areas of blocks of flats, and to do estate walkabouts.
The exercises result in significant benefits in terms of sharing good practice, new training ideas, getting views and new ideas from the volunteer inspectors and developing their confidence and abilities.
Future mystery shopping exercises
Future programmes will be based on ideas and requests from our volunteers and members of staff.
How to contact us
Strategic Housing Unit
Housing Governance, Strategy and Quality Team
Town Hall
Knowsley Street
Bury
BL9 0AF
E-mail: housing@bury.gov.uk
Phone: 0161 253 7573 or 0161 253 6894
