design: impulsant
Saturday, January 01, 2005

MysteryMailer concept

If I understand the Ideabroker.nl concept well I can submit an idea. Well... Here's one.
It's very normal for a company to hire a marketing agency to send a "Mystery Shopper" to their stores to test the service and accuracy and competence of its employees.
I thought up a concept to do the same, but in the reilm of the Internet. I would call it "MysteryMailer" (the .nl domain is still free!) and MysteryMailer can be hired by companies who want to test their Internet-end of their communications strategy.
Are people receiving relevant information? Are people with little budget treated differently than people with big bucks? Are assumptions being made about the budgets of people?
MysteryMailer could go in to directions: Either as a kind of agency that can be hired by companies who want to test themselves, or can act as a kind of independent testing organisation that creates publications of their findings. What do you think?

7 Comments:

  • I like the idea very much. Especially if you could sorf of automate it. You could send a standard message to every eCommerce and fortune 500 company website in the netherlands and track the response time. That alone would be very interesting to watch. Then you could have customers rate these companies based on helpdesk quility and responsiveness. That way you get great results with a minimum of effort. If you need the money for the domain and hosting, let me know!

    By Blogger Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, at 12:09 am  

  • Love the idea. Boris, if you fund it, I think you might have gold in your hands. I did hear the idea a while back, in the US of course, but they had no business plan and if I remember the name right, their site currently reads that it doesn't exist anymore.

    Anyway, as someone that once did an internship at a mystery shop organisation, I like it. You need to automate a lot of it, and you can get hired by specific companies that want to check their online channels.

    All you need to do is have someone with a network that can get you the clients. I think the big companies will be most interested in this. Also there is a big oppertunity at recruitment, many of the companies (bigger once) have trouble with their online recruitment (e-mail handling, website respons, etc) I think there is a big market open there too.

    If you need a marketeer (no cure, no pay) to help launch it, let me know. I've already got tons of ideas how to launch this with little cost and lots of free publicity. And I think I've got some ideas for "secundairy markets" as well.

    By Blogger Bas van de Haterd, at 4:35 pm  

  • Damn'd, I don't think I ever made this many spelling and grammer errors in one post. Sorry people, can't seem to edit it. This will teach me never to have a phone conversation with a boring customer and write a comment here at the same time.

    By Blogger Bas van de Haterd, at 5:27 pm  

  • Oh, wow! :-)
    Ok, I will! I'll get in touch with you :-)

    By Blogger Annedien Hoen, at 11:14 am  

  • Even without the quality of the information you have a case here.

    On email respons:
    Junglerating researched financial institutions at the end of 2003 and found that 26% did not respond to an email sent to their company.(source: Emerce)Junglerating by the way claims to be specialised in the improvement of direct channels & they have another site www.mystershopping.net, but no reference to mystery mailing (as yet).

    Webdam monitors email responsetime of Dutch city councils. In September 2004 almost 29% never got back to the sender of the email (up from 23% in 2003!).

    By Blogger ant on a mission, at 2:32 am  

  • I figure most of you have read the stuff that went on between Boris and myself-- and we have tried to find a way to clarify communication and come up with a way to not let things go down the drain because of some rough weather.

    Turns out we both lack the time to really do all the realisation ourselves, so the idea is as following:

    We're looking for a third party to develop this concept.
    Boris will participate with hosting (which can be substantial once things take flight!), advice and network and I will participate with branding, identity design, marketing advice and network. (Network being 'contacts' that can seriously enhance the change for success!, people who can help and carry it further and what not!)

    The third party will have to build the technical application needed to realize the MysteryMailer and effectuate it - and it's up to this party to decide whether or not to focus on the 'personal' side of it or the automated side of it. (or facilitate both, but this would envolve more people I guess :-)
    Of course, I'm more than willing to help develop the concept a bit more in-depth.

    So... MysteryMailer, anyone?

    I think this is especially interesting for a company that is looking for a high-profile application and for whom the participation of two experienced entrepreneurs is a golden opportunity (especially the specific things that we can contribute.

    You can contact me through annedien@impulsant.nl

    Let's see what happens..... :-)

    Annedien

    By Blogger Annedien Hoen, at 4:46 pm  

  • OK, I have taken your 'partner request'& sent it on to some parties in my (Syntens) network. A first application party has reacted. I have sent their contact details to Annedien.
    Good luck.

    By Blogger ant on a mission, at 2:04 pm  

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