New York, NY – ‘Secret Shoppers’ Rate New York City Services

New York, NY – City officials have begun sending observers into public agency walk-in facilities posing as clients and secretly assessing service, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

Employing methods common to private retail businesses, the program since May has used “secret shoppers” to visit offices and inquire about services from the perspective of a first-time customer.

The “CORE” program, an acronym for Customers Observing and Researching Experience, made more than 300 visits to agencies, rating them on five points: the ability to translate foreign languages, facility conditions, staffs’ attitudes toward the public, how quickly waiting lines moved, and signage and access.

“In the private sector, it’s common practice for companies to send what they call ‘secret shoppers’ into restaurants, stores and hotels,” Bloomberg said. “You have to find out whether your people are helping the customer if you want to stay in business, and the city has to know whether we are helping the people we’re supposed to serve.”

After visits to 308 of the city’s 713 walk-in facilities, 22 CORE observers gave them a rating of 2.7 on a 4.0 scale. Facility conditions received the highest percentage of “good” ratings, at 58 percent, and language access got the most “poor” ratings, at 45 percent, according to a report prepared by the mayor’s office.

The ratings will be published in the Mayor’s Management Report, an annual compendium of quality-of-life and agency performance statistics, the mayor said.

“Agencies will be held accountable for meeting citywide goals and for prioritizing the five elements of good service on which the CORE program was based,” the report said.