I’m going to stay in a 3-star hotel for this weekend.

I’m going to be a ‘mystery shopper’, meaning that every customer service experience I have will be recorded on a detailed questionnaire.  Actually, it’s not only me, it’s Grace and the Wiffe too.

We three are commissioned to report back on the whole range of bed & breakfast for two nights, one lunch, one dinner, the gym, treatments in the spa… 

Unfortunately the hotel doesn’t have broadband

otherwise I might post contemporaneous notes.  I better not name the hotel in advance, in case someone might pick it up and improve the service.

I’ve never done this before.  Every time I go into supermarkets, I wish I could be employed as a mystery shopper because I pay such attention to detail and am highly sensitive about customer service.  (I’ve a track record of embarrassing my children over my insistence that customer service should impress me.)

Nostalgia in the air… 

Years ago, when I was in charge of customer service training in the bus part of London Transport, I hired a company to do some mystery shopping.  They travelled round on buses experiencing and  reporting back on the standard of service  they got.  It was a good discipline to design the questionnaire which determined what they looked at.  The data they collected formed the basis of customer service training for staff. So there is a bit of going down memory lane about this weekend.

I’m bringing the waterproofs.