A customer's point of view and perceived levels of service are critical to increasing profit in the hospitality industry. How can your team ensure customer expectations are being met all while achieving brand standards? Sending in a mystery shopper acting as a customer, your company gains the knowledge to react and focus resources on the priorities of your clientele.
Mystery shopping can have both immediate and long term benefits depending on how an organization utilizes the results and reporting. Keeping in mind any shop program is a snapshot in time, they are most impactful at expanding insights when partnered with results from guest satisfaction programs already in place within your organization.
A professional mystery shopper will experience your property without pre-conceived notions impacting the evaluation of your business. The unbiased reviews provide your organization the opportunity to clearly understand your customer's perspective on daily operations in a specific moment in time. Shop programs are an inexpensive method to hear which "wow" factors have a substantial impact on your guest's perception and loyalty. This additional source of professional feedback gives executives' confidence in their strategic initiative decisions regarding levels of service to meet the company's brand promise.
Trained feedback allows leadership to make educated decisions about:
-
Implementing best practices in service and daily operations
-
Refining levels of service to maximize your competitive advantages
-
Confirming the integrity of employees, procedures, internal controls and safety issues.
-
Training efforts to reinforce top notch service, as well as correct weaknesses in an operation
-
Increasing your customer's intent to return, rate and recommend
The concept of a shop program is also a powerful motivational tool for employees. The thought of a mystery shopper checking in at any time encourages the staff to be more likely to provide excellent customer service to each and every customer knowing that they may be evaluated.
Benefits of an effective mystery shopping program:
-
Learning a client's impression of the property and tangible products
- Understanding the value and quality perception of your customers
-
Insight into employee interaction when management is not present and how staff attitudes positively or negatively affect your business
- Monitoring success of training in place to yield a turn on investment
An on-going mystery shop program provides the benefit of invaluable information with regard to how your business is functioning as a whole. Implementing a shop program enables the collection of first hand data on how to move your business forward and can evolve with your business to meet changing needs of your company and your customers.
Mystery shopping is a valid tool as part of any overall strategy formed to gain insight into the customer experience that is difficult to get in any other way. Mystery shopping is a valuable stand alone tool, but when coupled with your guest and employee survey data, its value grows exponentially as you now have a full picture of cause, affect and results. Implementing a program that correlates customer satisfaction to other key measures enhances your organization's ability to increase their top and bottom line.
Source: UniFocus
