Establishing the Standard: ARCO’s National Mystery Shopping Pilot for the Integrated Retirement Community Sector
ARCO — the UK’s leading trade body for the Integrated Retirement Community (IRC) sector — commissioned MORICON Consultants to design and deliver a national mystery shopping pilot across its member communities. The programme provided a consistent, evidence-based picture of how prospective residents experienced the sales and enquiry journey — and where the sector stood against its own Consumer Code.
The Problem
For older people and their families considering a move into a retirement community, the sales and enquiry process is rarely just transactional. It is often a high-stakes, emotionally complex decision involving significant financial commitment and a fundamental change in lifestyle. ARCO’s Consumer Code sets clear expectations for how members should support prospective residents through that process — but without independent, real-world assessment, it was difficult to know how consistently those standards were being met in practice.
ARCO faced three connected challenges.
· First, while ARCO had a well-established compliance review programme, it had no systematic mechanism to assess compliance performance on the ground across member communities at scale.
· Second, it lacked an objective view of the prospect experience — how enquiries were handled, whether fee information was clearly explained, whether the right documents were provided at the right time, and whether sales teams struck the right balance between commercial intent and genuine decision support.
· Third, without a consistent methodology applied across communities, there was no meaningful benchmark against which members could understand their own performance.
The existing programme needed to evolve. ARCO was designing a new Standards and Compliance framework and needed the pilot to generate the evidence and insight to inform it.
What We Did
MORICON was appointed following a competitive tender process and worked in close partnership with ARCO’s compliance team throughout.
Framework design
Through a collaborative design phase with ARCO stakeholders, MORICON developed a bespoke audit questionnaire spanning nearly 200 questions across three phases of the customer journey: Digital Research and Initial Contact; Booking and Site Visit; and Follow-up and Decision Support. The questionnaire was built to reflect the specific emotional and practical realities of the IRC customer journey, including the involvement of adult family members, the complexity of financial and tenure arrangements, and the importance of decision support over sales pressure.
Scoring methodology
MORICON designed and applied a proprietary 40/20/40 scoring framework, weighting Compliance, Good Practice, and Customer Experience equally between compliance and experience (40% each), with Good Practice assessed separately at 20%. This structure allowed ARCO to see not only whether communities met regulatory requirements, but how well they delivered them in practice.
Field delivery
24 retirement communities were audited across England and Wales between October 2025 and February 2026. Each community received a full three-phase assessment conducted by trained auditors operating as genuine prospective residents or influencers.
Reporting
Each member received an individual audit report. ARCO received an aggregated executive summary with sector-level benchmarking, performance band analysis, and thematic findings — structured to support both Standards Committee review and the design of the Year Two programme.
The Outcome
The pilot delivered a sector benchmark where none had previously existed., ARCO now held consistent, comparable performance data across 24 member communities, assessed against the same criteria and scored through the same framework.
The disaggregated scoring structure surfaced findings that a single overall score would have obscured. Several communities achieved strong compliance scores while their customer experience ratings indicated that the journey felt procedural rather than person-centred. Others demonstrated warm, well-supported prospect experiences but could do more to achieve best practice under the Consumer Code. This distinction — which communities were compliant versus which were genuinely excellent — proved to be one of the programme’s most valuable insights.
The pilot also surfaced a set of good practice behaviours that consistently drove stronger customer experience scores — small but meaningful actions such as proactive information-sharing, personalised follow-up, and clear, jargon-free explanation of financial arrangements. These are not complex or costly to implement, but they are now measurable. For the first time, members have a clear, evidence-based picture of the specific behaviours that move a community from compliant to excellent — and a repeatable framework to track progress against them.
The findings fed directly into ARCO’s Standards review and are informing the structure, scope, and weighting of the full programme launching in the 2026/27 membership year. ARCO enters Year Two with a robust, tested methodology, a baseline for member benchmarking, and a clear picture of where sector-wide improvement is most needed.
About Moricon
Moricon designs operating systems and service frameworks for luxury hospitality and branded residential properties. The company specialises in creating scalable standards and training solutions that enable premium brands to deliver consistent service excellence across their portfolios whilst reducing operational costs and management overhead.