Members of MSPA Europe (The Mystery Shopping Practitioners Association’s European chapter) have conducted a major, pan-European, survey of queues.
Qualisell Survey & Consulting Ltd., Moscow took part in this survey having organized mystery shops in Russian cities.
Mystery Shoppers from 24 countries joined queues in shops, fast food outlets, post offices and banks in an effort to see how long the average customer had to wait in a queue, whether staff did anything to reduce queue lengths, and how well the customer was served when, eventually, they reached the front.
The average customer took over 5 minutes to reach the front of the queue – with the longest queue we found being 1 hour and 50 minutes.
Amongst other fascinating findings, the research shows:
Which country has the longest queues, on average? : Italy
Which retailer has the longest queues? : Post Offices
In which country, are customers are most fed up with the queue? : Latvia
Who has the slowest queues? : Russia
When it comes to the customer service received at the front of the queue, only half the serving staff could manage a smile, and less than one in ten apologized to their customers.
Commenting on the survey results, John Farrell (MSPA President) said;
“This survey proves the value of mystery customers in the measurement of service to customers – and indicates just how far the retail industry has to go in order to reach the high standards expected by customers”
You can find more details on the results of this survey on our web site:
http://Mystery-Shopper.ru/uploads/Summary_MSPA_Queue_survey_2008.pdf
You can download this press release in .pdf format here:
http://Mystery-Shopper.ru/uploads/Qualisell_Survey_and_Consulting__MSPA_queue_survey_2008_EN.pdf
