Secret shopping

She hit on the name “Molepolole,” which is actually a city in Botswana in southern Africa. The name stuck with her because one of her colleagues was a native of that region and she thought it was unique.

The company’s primary objective, she said, is to assist clients to boost their bottom line or profitability.

Ensuring that businesses, both online and land-based, provide quality customer service is also one of Molepolole’s aims said Ramnath, the company’s managing director.

The low-profile marketing company, still shy of its one-year anniversary, is located on Independence Square, Port-of-Spain. There is also a branch in New York and Canada but run as separate units.

Ramnath, who has an honours degree in Biochemistry and Marketing, attributes her experience in running the marketing company to her ability to easily switch thinking gears.

This, she said, is one of the key reasons why she has been able to successfully platform herself within industries ranging from wholesale and retail to consulting and pharmaceutical to entertainment.

Molepolole, she said, runs what she calls a “secret shopping operation,” in which they use data to measure and monitor customer service performance of private businesses.

Secret shopping, Ramnath explained, is a long-established research technique that uses “shoppers” to represent a company’s customer profile.

These shoppers, she said, are given guidelines to anonymously evaluate and monitor customer service, operations, employee integrity, merchandising and product quality.

“It fills a gap of critical information between operations and marketing,” she said.

The method, she added, is used on the front line to collect data that helps determine what happens to customers and prospective customers when they visit a particular company.

In order to find out what works best for a company, she said Molepolole meets with the client to determine the focus for the “secret shopping” programme.

A team is then selected based on the company’s customer profile, she explained.

The secret shopping team consists of about 50 people of varying ages, professions, races and both male and female. They are given a list of questions to memorise beforehand, in preparation for the “interview.”

The shopping is done unknown to the staff at the company but only management is aware of it, Ramnath said.

After the evaluation is complete, the team reports its findings to the company and makes recommendations for improvement.

“The aim is to see how customers are treated and to make employees aware of what is important in serving customers,” Ramnath said.

Other survey methodologies, she said, offer a number of ways to evaluate customers including telephone surveys and in-store comment cards, but these she added, are often brief and can capture only a few key measurements of service.

Molepolole, she explained, is not only about secret shopping. With a team of models in its arsenal, the company also caters to the world of entertainment by doing promotions for new and existing products at various companies.

In addition, the company does market research for budding entrepreneurs and whether a project might be feasible or not. “We can gauge success through market research or feasibility studies,” she said.

She explained that the company had a client who wanted to open a new business in Chaguanas, but at the last minute started to panic.

So a team was sent out to do a survey to evaluate if people were interested in what the company had to offer. Ramnath boasted that the business is now up and running today.

On-line businesses are not left out, as Molepolole has developed a process of evaluating the efficiency of Internet-based businesses. They can find out whether or not e-mails are being received by customers and even the length of time, for instance, the download of offers and promotions takes.

“We have an idea of what the download time should be. So if a download time should be five minutes and the secret shopper realises that it takes seven, then we send an e-mail to the business stating this.

“If it takes as long as 15 minutes we immediately call them up and alert them,” Ramnath said.

To do this efficiently, the company works alongside an international company that tests software, and to whom reports are sent. The evaluation of every new feature of their clients’ business is done on a daily basis, Ramnath said.

Molepolole’s client base in this segment so far has been global, as there are very few local companies who run their companies online, Ramnath pointed out.

“Our clients depend on the Internet as their store and a significant percentage of revenue is dependent on offers being taken up,” she explained.