Oil & Gas mystery shopping in Qatar & the GCC
A forecourt is a network of identical sites where the only variable is how they are run, and it is also the highest-consequence retail environment in the country for a safety lapse. Both facts make it worth measuring independently.
The criteria for this sector.
Forecourt evaluation covers three things that sit awkwardly together: service speed, HSE compliance, and the convenience retail operation attached to the site. Each has its own criteria and the report keeps them separate, because a site can be fast, unsafe and clean all at once.
Weighting is agreed with you section by section during scoping. It states what you consider important and it has to be defensible to the location that scores badly because of it.
What we keep finding in oil & gas.
Attendant response time at the pump is the service measure customers actually notice, and it varies enormously by daypart across the Qatari network. The scorecard records the time from stopping at the pump to the attendant arriving, and separately whether the attendant was engaged with a phone, another customer or nothing at all when the vehicle arrived.
HSE compliance is observed and recorded factually rather than judged. Whether the engine-off instruction was given, whether smoking was challenged when observed, whether the nozzle was handled correctly, whether spill kit and extinguisher were present and unobstructed, and whether the attendant wore the required protective equipment. This is the part of the report that goes to a different audience from the service findings and it is formatted for them.
The convenience shop attached to the forecourt is scored on the retail scorecard, reduced to what is observable in a short visit: availability of core lines, price accuracy at the till, hot-food holding standards where a food offer exists, and cleanliness.
Restroom condition is the criterion with the greatest effect on whether a driver returns to a site, and it is the one most often absent from operator reporting. It is scored against an itemised standard with a timestamp, so that a poor result can be checked against the site's own cleaning log.
Reporting splits into two documents from a single visit. HSE observations go to the safety function with the raw observation record attached and no service commentary; the service and retail findings go to network operations. Sites are never named to one audience in a way that pre-empts the other's process, and the sequencing is agreed before the first wave runs.
Fleet and commercial customers are a separate scenario worth running. A fleet card transaction, a bulk fill or a commercial account query involves different staff, different systems and different failure points from the retail motorist, and the commercial revenue at stake per site is usually larger than the retail revenue the standard scorecard covers. Site selection should include the network's remoteness spread rather than clustering around Doha. Performance at sites on the Salwa Road and Al Shamal corridors differs measurably from urban forecourts, and a panel drawn for auditor convenience will not show it.
What a shopper actually does on a visit.
The standard refuel
A timed fuel purchase covering attendant response, HSE observation and payment. This is the core instrument and it runs across the network at defined dayparts.
The night visit
The same scorecard after 22:00, when staffing thins and the gap between best and worst site is widest. Most operators have no data at all from this window.
The shop and restroom visit
A convenience purchase and a restroom check on the same visit, scored on the retail and facility criteria and reported separately from the forecourt findings.
The scorecard structure.
HSE items are recorded as factual observations rather than as scored judgements, and are reported separately from the service score.
What clients act on first.
The night visit is where forecourt networks find the gap. Sites that perform to standard during the day frequently do not after 22:00, and because almost no operator collects data from that window it stays invisible until an incident makes it visible.
A named case study with a baseline, a date and a result belongs here. We have not substituted a percentage for one. Every figure of that kind on the previous site was unsourced, and several contradicted each other.
Case studiesHow we measure this sector.
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