Category: Restaurant & Hospitality

If your restaurant has drive thru locations, your goal is to ensure consumers return to your drive thru – and not to your competitor’s instead. Before you can improve, you need to know how drive thru associates perform. 

Need a quick guide to ensure a mystery shop program is on track or to initiate a second type of program for your company? We know the details can be overwhelming, so we developed an agenda of items to consider. Items vary by type of shop (onsite, phone, competitor, etc.) and by industry (restaurant, retail automotive, banking, call center, etc.). 

When you think about trends that impact food service, it’s overwhelming: Older baby boomers dine out more often; social media restaurant conversations and feedback travel instantaneously; more customers choose smaller portions or snacks outside traditional meal times; and quick serve restaurants compete with fast casuals by adding trendy ingredients. Just as managers change menus and strategies as they adjust to these new trends, they should also fine tune restaurant mystery shopping goals to measure how well they meet demands produced by these trends. 

Nation's Restaurant News reports that casual restaurants grew sales at 1% in 2010, and projected growth annually for 2011 is not projected to be much higher. Some customers that previously dined out frequently now scale back restaurant visits or limit them to special occasions.