The School of Continuous Improvement's seminar series opens its next session on how a mystery-shopper checklist reshapes the counter service it was built only to score.
Dr Torun Ezeigwe brings the School of Continuous Improvement's seminar series to the checklist that grades a counter transaction, and the service that has learned to grade itself
A mystery shopper’s checklist is meant to grade the ten minutes it visits. Long enough at any till, staff learn to read the grade rather than the visit — the greeting delivered on cue, the badge angled toward the counter, the receipt offered before it’s asked for, whichever items the form happens to check that quarter. Improvement Grand Rounds, the School of Continuous Improvement’s standing seminar series, opens its next session on what a counter transaction looks like once the score has quietly become the target it once only measured.
Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Director of the Master of Applied Measurement, leads the session. Her research follows a marking rubric from its validation study into the room where it is actually used, tracking how a scoring instrument reshapes the behaviour it was built only to observe. The mystery-shopper form is her latest case: a handful of ticked boxes standing in for a transaction none of them fully describes.
A checklist that grades the greeting eventually gets the greeting it asked for, and stops getting anything else.
— Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Director, Master of Applied Measurement
Dr Bram Ntuli, the series’ convenor, called it a natural extension of Grand Rounds’ habit of pointing the School’s own instruments back at itself: “a standing seminar series eventually runs out of easier targets and has to look at the counter next door.”
Grand Rounds keeps its brief broad enough to include the School’s own front counter, not just the schemes it studies elsewhere. Session timing and room details follow closer to the date.