Category: Mystery Shopping

What kind of an impact will the new health care laws have on customer dining out experiences?

As restaurants adjust to new laws on healthcare for employees who work more than 30 hours per week, managers will juggle employee schedules and budgets even more so than in the past. The restaurant industry's reliance on part time workers ensures that the industry will feel a big impact when the new law comes into play in 2014. Some restaurants, such as Darden Restaurants, whose concepts includes Red Lobster, Olive Garden and Longhorn Steakhouse, will reassess the number of employees who will receive health benefits within the law and determine ways to manage the increased benefits costs . Other restaurants, such as Panera, say that for now, they have no plans to adjust employee hours because of the new law. Still others worry about the ability to afford good people in order to provide good service at their restaurants.

Several restaurants are preparing now. Darden Restaurants is currently testing the limiting of staff hours at some locations. No doubt, management will evaluate

We are constantly reminded of why our quality assurance process is so valuable to our clients. Despite ever-smarter technology, there is no replacement for an actual review of a report before it’s released to our client. Spell check can’t and won’t uncover all errors!

In 2011, we posted an article highlighting some mystery shopper funnies that Confero’s team had encountered over the years. We were surprised at all the positive feedback from those who enjoyed reading them. Given its popularity, we decided to post more humorous quotes this month.

• “There were no baggers helping the cashier so I bagged myself”.
• “I ordered tuna and the server went into a drawer for it.”

In the heart of budget season, many companies agonize over where they will focus limited dollars and also how to justify spends with ROI. For example, social media ROI questions are everywhere. Organizations from retail to food service to financial services invest in Facebook and other social media, and justifiably, they want to quantify what they receive from these efforts. While there is plenty of debate about the best way to measure social media ROI, calculations for mystery shopping ROI are clear. It’s no secret that mystery shops help build and maintain momentum for your sales efforts, however companies need to dig deeper to learn the specific value returned from mystery shopping. In response to this, Confero developed a calculator to help clients determine this.

Would you like to learn more about how to calculate ROI for your telephone mystery shopping or onsite mystery shopping program? Here’s information that you need:

Last year, we wrote a well-received article about 25 business types for mystery shopping programs, drawing from our years of experience with a variety of clients in many industries. From convenience stores to upscale retailers to restaurants and medical practices, mystery shopping reports go a long way toward revealing how well employees interact with customers on a daily basis.

So, how do our clients use mystery shopping? Mostly, mystery shopping is used to find out about those things customers won’t tell you in surveys or social media comments, or issues you can't discover by asking customers. If our client has a customer service delivery process or set of procedures in place for fulfilling a brand promise in front of a consumer customer, chances are the process can by mystery shopped.

We’ve compiled our top ten list of mystery shopping uses here.

Companies can realize unanticipated rewards when they change their approach to how shoppers gather the information or add mystery shop sections. As the examples below illustrate, the rewards may include improved safety measures and even the discovery of website pitfalls, to name two.

For an automotive client, adding non customer service questions to the mystery shopper survey resulted in valuable data and potential savings in safety-related areas for the company.  The company consulted with other departments to gain ideas on areas that mystery shoppers should assess at their locations. In response, Confero added several safety-related questions to the survey.  Following the visits with the added survey questions, management was able to quickly view mystery shop results through a secure web-based reporting system, including the information about safety procedures. The results: fast data on safety deficiencies at certain locations as well as decreased number of accidents, due to the increased accountability that the mystery shop program created. You can view other stories on our Automotive Mystery Shopping and Customer Experience Research Case Studies page.