Understanding Mystery Shopping: The build-to-rent (BTR) sector has witnessed a remarkable surge in popularity as the demand for rental housing continues to grow. BTR operators must distinguish themselves and build a strong brand presence in this dynamic landscape. One innovative and effective strategy that can significantly benefit BTR operators is the incorporation of anonymous audits during apartment viewings. This essay explores how frequent audits can enhance brand value and contribute to the overall success of build-to-rent operators. This essay is part of the MORICON Mystery Shopping Insight initiative, a series of articles focusing on brand excellence and performance improvement in apartment viewings. A secret shop or audit evaluates the quality of service a business offers by deploying anonymous individuals to act as potential customers. In the context of BTR, the anonymous audit involves sending trained evaluators to participate in apartment viewings as prospective tenants. This process allows operators to gain valuable insights into the customer experience, identifying strengths and areas for improvement in their service delivery. Building Trust and Customer Confidence: One of the primary advantages of incorporating such audits in the apartment viewing process is its ability to build trust and instil confidence in prospective tenants. The person posing as a potential renter, assesses various aspects, such as the property’s cleanliness, the staff’s professionalism, and the accuracy of information provided during the viewing. Positive experiences during these interactions contribute to establishing trust, a crucial element in the decision-making process for potential tenants. Identifying Areas for Improvement: Such auditing is a powerful tool for BTR operators to identify and rectify any shortcomings in their service delivery. Evaluators can provide detailed feedback on aspects like communication effectiveness, response time, and the overall impression of the property. This constructive feedback enables operators to refine their customer service processes, ensuring a seamless and satisfying experience for future tenants. Enhancing Brand Consistency: Consistency is critical in building a strong brand. Testing the standards and processes allows BTR operators to evaluate whether their brand values and standards are consistently maintained across different properties and interactions. Ensuring a uniform and positive brand experience at every touchpoint contributes to brand loyalty and positive word-of-mouth marketing. Competitive Advantage: In a competitive market, setting oneself apart is crucial for success. The audit provides BTR operators with a competitive edge by allowing them to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors. By benchmarking against industry standards, operators can adapt and innovate, ensuring that their offerings stand out in the eyes of potential tenants. It also de-risks the viewing process by creating an ongoing set of data points which allow a constant finetuning of operational standards. Conclusion: In conclusion, mystery shopping during apartment viewings is a strategic and beneficial practice for build-to-rent operators aiming to establish a strong brand presence. By focusing on building trust, identifying areas for improvement, ensuring brand consistency, and gaining a competitive advantage, BTR operators can create a positive and lasting impression on potential tenants. As the rental housing market continues to evolve, the integration of anonymous standards audits will be an invaluable tool in shaping the success and sustainability of build-to-rent operations. Contact us to learn how to benefit from our UK-wide operating team, how to compare your assets’ performance and see significant data-driven performance trends. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.Name *FirstLastEmail *Comment or Message Submit

How leading operators and landlords reap the 10 benefits of Mystery Shopping The hotel industry has been using this incredible straightforward process for decades to ensure that hotel teams follow the standards, understand procedures, and avoid costly service delivery mistakes. What could be better than getting first-hand information on your business’s performance from the people that are your customers? With a mystery shopping programme, you take control of the vital customer and brand experience and enable your team to stay ahead of market trends to deliver the best results. Let’s look at the benefits of a mystery shopping programme for your organisation and its impact on the customer journey. Typically, the audit process has the most impact during your customers’ consideration and decision-making phase. During the awareness phase, potential customers get familiar with your brand and learn about your product. Having done all the research, your potential customers become prospective customers, as they want to engage directly with your team and product: they come for a viewing. They hope to match their expectations with a positive experience, and based on a successful visit, they move into the decision phase and sign a contract. In this phase are many critical touchpoints to turn prospective customers into paying clients supporting your brand – or away should you get them wrong. So, what are the benefits of such a programme, you ask? Firstly, it increases your team’s efficiency: you frequently get the big picture of customer interaction and based on the findings, you can finetune processes to improve them. Furthermore, it helps your fact-finding and experience improvement activities to get feedback and reliable information on what you think is a smooth process. You like to know how your sales team performs – not on paper, but live: Do they sell passively or aggressively? Are they in tune with the customers? Do they care? Do they possess the proper knowledge? How is your building maintained? How does your lobby reflect on the customer? Sometimes we are professionally blinkered to minor defects – but the building itself is your calling card for good management and brand operations. You want to test the functionality of implemented processes and standards – just because they have been implemented doesn’t mean they are helpful. When was the last time you took a tour of your building? Good results can be a great motivational tool for your team – celebrate high scores and good comments, bringing the customer experience closer to them. Mirror, mirror on the wall…An audit makes your team aware of what is essential in serving your customers, don’t take a blind eye to be in your customer’s shoes. Results allow you to benchmark internally, across your company, to share and improve. Competitively, by studying your competitors’ practices and results, you can gain a competitive edge. Strategically, if you compare yourself with world-class organisations and use the inspiration to move your business to the next level. A frequent audit programme allows you to train your team in a new way: with nearly real-time information, you can course-correct and improve much faster and more agile than waiting for a standard training block delivered once or twice a year. Lastly, think about your customers! With constant improvement and reviews, you make your brand understood; you match the customer’s expectations of your brand, rewarding you with loyalty and retention. Think of the Ritz-Carlton Hotels – the only two-time winner of the Malcolm Baldridge Award of Quality in the service industry: The award cemented Ritz-Carlton’s business as an eminent service organisation, not only internally by increasing revenues considerably but also externally as a benchmark for exemplary services. Contact us today to discuss how you can reap the 10 benefits of mystery shopping for your customers and your team! Let the team of MORICON Mystery Shoppers provide you with unbiased data to make the right decisions! Meet us at UKAA Annual Conference on 15th November 2022 Sebastian will be part of a panel discussion (Session 5 at 1.30 pm “Lead to Lease – are you getting it right”?) highlighting the benefits of Mystery Shopping audits and presenting his company as an exhibitor. Please visit us at Stand No. 3

Mystery Shopping – Black Ops or Best Practice? How great operators get the most out of this service. Many businesses test their employees to understand how their standards work, their level of knowledge, customer focus, and service skills via mystery shoppers. Information gathered discretely and constructively by operators posing as customers provide businesses with a documented snapshot of a customer-business interaction. Companies use this information to course-correct their operations and often as training tools. So far, so good, but this primarily applies to the hospitality sector and high street operators – what about the BTR sector? Black Ops or Best Practice? Mystery Shopping often conjures images of secrecy, deception and borderline clandestine operations.  Hence, businesses often shy away from utilising this service, fearing that it will upset the employees, cause disruption, and be a costly but useless tool. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mystery shopping has existed since the late 1940s – it originally started in the US to measure employee performance and general service or product delivery. Banks and department stores used this service to understand employee-customer interactions better. What began as an on-the-shop-floor interaction grew into a multi-assessment tool, reporting on the many ways businesses are in contact with their customers: Social Media (communication and response times) Telephone (response times, rapport building) Face-to-face (in person or via video recording) Website (user-friendliness, navigation, branding) Email (timeliness, content, rapport building) There are many more criteria, but you get the point: this is a full MOT inspection of your business. You do take care of your car, don’t you? : MOT, service intervals, a wash now and then, etc. – why not do this at your business? There are so many benefits for you, your team and your business to not look at Mystery Shopping. A bit of theory… The principle behind the best practice approach is relatively old: it started in the 1920s with work on industrial quality by the American statistician Walter A. Shewhart. His work influenced a fellow mathematician and statistician – Edward Deming. He invented the Deming Cycle of Quality, a standard quality control tool, also known as the PDSA Cycle. The following graphic shows a typical PDSA cycle and its four stages: Plan, Do, Study and Act. The company plans what process needs to change and follows a prescribed path of evaluation, data gathering, testing, analysing and summarising the outcome. The crucial last step is to act on what comes next: what needs to change and to start another cycle to verify the processes continuously. The secret lies in the ongoing activity of using the  PDSA approach to eliminate pain points in your operation. Mystery Shopping as benchmarking tool BTR The BTR sector is very similar to the hospitality industry: it depends heavily on human interaction to sell your community or brand, with many moving parts influencing the outcome. A regular audit programme allows BTR operators to stay on top of how they market their business and shape customer interaction whilst getting first-hand insight into the customer perception of their business. One can learn from organisations such as Ritz-Carlton Hotels that took quality control to new heights: the only two-time winner in the service category of the prestigious Malcolm Baldridge Award. The award cemented Ritz-Carlton’s business as an eminent service organisation, not only internally by increasing revenues considerably but also externally as a benchmark for exemplary services. The legendary “Green Book” remains the best practice bible for high-quality, focused operators. To get the most out of embarking on an audit programme should be carefully evaluated: what processes need improvement, what changes to the customer journey need tweaking, and what is the timeframe for it? It makes no sense to have one or two snapshot audits – they can only reflect a point in time, similar to tossing a coin. Only with a planned approach will you understand if measured behaviour is systemic or simply a random occurrence. Whatever you decide, rest assured that you are embracing a best-practice approach that yields many benefits to your business and your customers. Meet us at UKAA Annual Conference on 15th November 2022 Sebastian will be part of a panel discussion (Session 5 at 1.30 pm “Lead to Lease – are you getting it right”?) highlighting the benefits of Mystery Shopping audits and presenting his company as an exhibitor. Please visit us at Stand No. 3 and find out if Mystery Shopping is black ops or best practice!

Understanding your customer journey is your best strategy – they did their homework, but did you? Here are just a few touchpoints that you should be aware of: Ease of booking – how fast can you make an appointment, and how often does your team have to email back and forth to gather all the criteria you require for a lettings contract? Are you listening? Do you use some information obtained during the initial contact to create a rapport with the customer? How often are you in contact before the viewing via phone or email? Are you sending a courtesy email with brand-relevant information before a viewing? When the customer arrives, who will likely be your brand’s first person to meet them? What is in place to make your customers welcome and expect? Have you “choreographed” and rehearsed your lettings tour? Do you provide a complete picture of your brand offering, or are you “winging” it? What happens after the viewing? Is your team following up on any requests and checking if the customer is ready to move to the final step?   The reality can be quite different, and that’s where the Mystery Shopper provides operators and landlords with crucial insight. How do you know that during the many contacts with your brand, the prospective customer is happy, still engaged, and the recipient of curated and targeted information that ultimately leads to a signed contract? Unless you are eavesdropping, you must rely on your team’s input, their interpretation of your brand, and their attempt to convert the viewing into a sale. Each day dozens of prospective customers are in contact with your brand to find a new home. Before they contact you, much research has gone into their planning. They pinpointed the desired location, evaluated comments from industry websites such as HomeViews, calculated their budget, planned their timelines, and are now directly engaged with your brand. They want to find out what life looks like in your building, the community they will live in, the amenities they enjoy, etc. In short, they are ready to test your brand promise! They visit your website, select their top one or two choices of apartments and book a viewing. Soon after, they meet your lettings team, visit your property, sign the leasing contract, move in and live happily ever after! Sounds too good to be true, but is it? Mystery Shopping has been a well-known best-strategy approach in the hotel industry for decades, and the build to rent sector will equally benefit from this approach. An audit allows operators to benchmark, course-correct when and where required, and offer a much better customer experience. With the rental market still favouring landlords, you might not think this is a necessary step, but as soon as the market swings around, old practices and behaviour can catch you off guard. It is tough to switch old habits quickly, and in a tenant-led market, you need all the advantages over your competitors.   According to the British Property Federation, in Q2/2022, a total of 47764 units are currently under construction across England – when they enter the market, your team should be ready! Acting on customer intel is the best strategy A Mystery Shopper will report on the entire customer journey, how they feel interacting with your team and brand and how well your brand promise meets their expectations. Based on receiving frequent feedback, you can consistently fine-tune your processes and standards to become (which is not only the best strategy forward, but also the best practice) more efficient in your booking process more service-focused when welcoming your customers to the property optimise your qualifying techniques to offer a targeted selection streamline your tours and focus on the essential parts of your customer journey  MORICON Mystery Shopper can be your eyes and ears on the ground – our team works throughout the UK and acts fast to test and report, allowing you to improve your customer and brand experience, audit by audit!  Don’t let the customer down on your brand promise! Manage the discovery part of the customer journey to reach a successful conclusion and reap the benefit of this best strategy approach: a signed lettings contract!