Our Mystery Shopping Panel: Any customer, any channel, any journey
Inside the panel that lets us deliver the right shopper – reliably, at scale, wherever your customers are.
When people ask about our mystery shopping panel, they usually start with the number — over 300,000 active shoppers across the UK and Ireland, growing by around 1,300 every month. It’s a number we’re proud of. But on its own, it misses the point.
What actually matters is what that panel lets us do: deliver the right shopper, on any channel, for any kind of customer journey – and get it done, reliably, at scale. That’s the real story, and it’s why so much of our work comes from other agencies who need fieldwork delivered.
Any channel a customer uses, we assess
Customers don’t experience your business through one door, so we don’t measure through one either. Telephone, face-to-face, website, mobile app, social media, live chat, formal audits – if it’s a channel your customers use, we cover it. There’s no part of the customer experience we can’t reach.
From two minutes to two years
The range of what a single panel can deliver is what surprises people most.
At one end, the quick checks: a two-minute phone enquiry, a fast website test, a quick price-check in a retail store. At the other, the long-haul journeys that unfold over months – mortgage applications, equity release, financial advice, buying a house, taking out a loan. Some of these assessments run well beyond twelve months, tracking the full experience from first enquiry to final outcome.
Short or long, simple or complex, it’s the same principle: capture the real journey, exactly as a real customer would live it. Across it all, we complete over 100,000 assessments a year.
Real customers, not professional reviewers
Our shoppers are fully briefed for every assignment, but deliberately not “trained.” It’s a conscious choice. The moment a shopper becomes a polished, professional evaluator, they stop behaving like your actual customer – and you lose the very thing you’re trying to measure. Keeping our shoppers close to genuine customers is what keeps the insight honest.
Inclusive by design
We keep barriers to entry to a minimum, on purpose. Real customers are diverse, so our panel has to be too. A representative panel is the only kind that gives a representative view – inclusivity isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s what makes the findings true.
Specialist panels when they’re needed
Alongside the main panel, shoppers opt into specialist areas where particular skills or circumstances matter:
- Video mystery shopping
- Audio mystery shopping
- Accessibility testing
- Rail specialists
- Auditing specialists
- Fundraising specialists
So when a programme calls for a specific capability, we’re drawing from people genuinely suited to it – not stretching a general panel to fit.
A community we look after
A panel is really a community of people, and we treat it that way. Shoppers browse and apply for assignments by email, through an online portal, or via our mobile app. We share monthly shopper stats to keep everyone engaged – and one figure we particularly love: every month, shoppers who’ve been with us for ten years or more take on their first-ever assignment, always in double digits.
Behind the scenes, an in-house fraud prevention team protects the integrity of our data and our shoppers, and a dedicated Shopper Support Committee keeps the panel supported – because a well-supported panel is a reliable one.
For our fieldwork partners
A lot of what we do is delivered on behalf of other agencies – partners who’ve won work they need help fulfilling, or who don’t have the panel, the reach or the capacity to deliver it themselves. That’s exactly where we come in.
The promise is simple: we’ll get it done. Full UK and Ireland coverage, any channel, any journey length, at the volume required – delivered reliably so that you deliver for your client. No drama, no gaps, no surprises. Just the fieldwork, done properly, so your name looks as good as it should.
We practise what we preach
The part we’re proudest of: we run an in house mystery shopping programme where we recruit mystery shoppers to assess our own service to shoppers. We hold ourselves to the very standard we help our clients reach. If we’re going to measure how well organisations look after their customers, the least we can do is be measured the same way.
The bottom line
Any customer, any channel, any journey – captured faithfully and delivered reliably. The size of our panel matters because it’s what makes that breadth and dependability possible: the bigger and more diverse the pool, the more precisely we can match the right shopper to the right assignment, and the more confidently we can promise it’ll get done. It’s not about having the most shoppers. It’s about delivering the right experience, every time.