By: Sentry Marketing Group

February 2, 2015

While customer surveys certainly have their place, they primarily measure customer perception, and not necessarily customer experience. Mystery shopping fills in the missing piece of this picture.

Practical wisdom says that the success of any business operating in an open market depends largely on its ability to provide customers with a satisfying experience.  As Jim Bush, Executive Vice President of American Express World Service, said quite succinctly, “Getting service right is more than just a nice to do; it’s a must do. American consumers are willing to spend more with companies that provide outstanding service, and they will also tell, on average, twice as many people about bad service than they will about good service. Ultimately, great service can drive sales and customer loyalty.”

Of course, any business owner knows that giving customers what they want must be done in a way that is cost-effective and realistic.  This means developing a set of standards that will at once drive customer contentment and loyalty and maintain and grow the bottom line.

As markets have become packed with more and more competitors, business owners and executives have grown increasingly concerned with their capacity to collect actionable data related to customer experience.  They know that, in order to get to and remain at the head of their industry, they must constantly analyze customer landscape, mindset, and experience.

Over the years, a variety of staple methods have been developed to help businesses accomplish this.  For customer-facing retail, restaurant, and hospitality industries, two of the most relied-on and well-known of these are customer surveys and mystery shopping programs.

An interesting trend that we in the business of helping companies with this process have noticed is the common mistake of collapsing these two methods of data collection, of thinking of them as yielding the same basic data sets and therefore providing the same types of insights.  The reality is quite the opposite.

Customer Surveys

With the rise of digital communication, more and more companies have begun to utilize online surveys and customer feedback portals to collect data related to customer experience.  Rarely do you get a receipt these days that does not have a URL for a customer survey; likewise, it has become commonplace for your server at a restaurant to remind you that you can scan the tablecard with your smartphone to leave feedback on your meal, in return for which you may win a giftcard or free drink or even a cash prize.

While customer surveys certainly have their place and provide much more useful information than just, say, scanning reviews on Yelp! or Urbanspoon, it should be recognized that what surveys measure primarily is customer perception and not necessarily customer experience.  They tell you much more about how the customer felt about what happened while they were in your establishment than the reality of what happened.

Since it is important that customers generally feel positive about their experience with you, this is valuable information to have, especially in terms of identifying trends.  Obviously, if very seventh customer is dissatisfied, something is not being done right – but what?  Surveys can only tell you whether your customers are happy, whether they plan to return to your establishment, whether they expect to recommend you to their friends, etc., and that only at the time they take the survey.  If there is anything an experienced business owner has learned, though, it is that human beings are fickle, especially in an economy that affords them so many choices.

Moreover, human beings’ perceptions are affected by any variety of factors, many of which are well beyond your control.  Your customers are not, for the most part, trained to be objective.  It is easy to imagine, then, that a customer might, for example, give entirely different responses about their experience depending on whether or not their date went well or their child was fussy.  A perfectly acceptable four minute wait can seem like an eternity with a boring date or a screaming youngster.  The customer’s experience of the passage of that time will almost invariably color the responses they provide in a survey.

Mystery Shopping

Mystery shopping fills in the missing side of this picture.  Shoppers look for the things you expect from your business.  They are trained to do this objectively, and the questions they are asked to answer are designed to elicit quantifiable and objective answers that tell you what is actually happening on your front lines.  They are not concerned about whether they grew impatient waiting for their order to be taken – instead, they can tell you the number of minutes they had to wait, providing you with actual data you can use to determine whether your staff if falling short of your expectations or your standards are falling short of your customer’s expectations.

Mystery shopping can also give you insight into those areas of your sales plan that might be missing the mark.  Perhaps you have noticed that your beverage sales are not what you would expect or that brand recognition is not what you had hoped.  It would (or should) be awkward to ask your customers “Did your server offer you a beverage from our bar?” or “Was your item presented to you in one of our branded bags?”  These are the things a mystery shopper is paid to notice.

One Happy Family

With these things in mind, it is easy to see how a mystery shopping program and a survey program would complement each other.  On the one hand, it is difficult to know whether current policies and strategies are effective if you do not even know whether or how well they are being implemented; on the other hand, customer surveys can give you an idea of what aspects of operations might be the focus of your mystery shopping program and give you insight into whether or not strategies that, because of the program, you now know are being properly implemented are effective in improving customer perception.

Counseling

Like any relationship, the marriage of mystery shopping and customer surveys is likely to benefit from the guidance and advice of those with more experience their execution.  This is where companies like Sentry Marketing Group can be invaluable.  While it may seem simple to put together a list of questions to ask your customers, creating a survey with questions that will yield useful responses, preparing a platform that will encourage participation, and, most importantly, designing a channel by which the information gathered can be presented in a meaningful way are all more challenging than you might think.  This is even more the case with designing a mystery shopping program.  Between training and managing shoppers, determining how best to gather the most important information, and culling and organizing that information into usable reports, it is rarely if ever effective—cost or otherwise—for a business to try to run its own program.

Why not call on the expertise of a company that already has prepared the foundations of upon which your business’s program can be effectively built?  One that is already familiar with the processes and practices that will make such a program run smoothly and that can readily recognize how to optimize the raw data that is produced?  Sure, you can try to build a house on your own, but why not hire professionals who already know what they’re doing?  It will be easier and, ultimately, less costly for you and you will get a better and more robust product with accordingly higher return.