Tag: restaurant

Restaurant mystery shoppingand training efforts are even more important during the holidays, with busy employees facing the challenges of managing more customer traffic. With holiday celebrations for family and offices soon to be in full swing at restaurants across the nation, and alcohol often a big

On the spot restaurant reviews, customer service remarks, and feedback on wait times. Whatever customers talk about online, managers immediately learn about customer feelings when they monitor social media. While these instantaneous comments are an important part of understanding customer opinions, the feedback is very different from customer experience services such as mystery shops and customer satisfaction surveys.

Casual online comments travel fast, and make a substantial impact on potential customer buying decisions as well as employee morale. Onsite and telephone mystery shopping results help companies reward employees for positive sales behaviors and fine tune training efforts. Customer opinions through web or mobile surveys provide honest input about employees and services. With these differences in mind, and the added complexity of random online comments, many companies wonder how all three types of research fit together.

In 2009, our own Rob Barry, Confero Account Executive, spoke with the Wall Street Journal’s “The Numbers Guy” blogger Carl Bialik forhis Waiting Game article. Rob provided insight from his experience managing mystery shopping programs for grocery store clients. Technology is moving at a much faster pace than 2009, and customer waiting time is a topic worth revisiting. 

Whether you manage a bank, restaurant, service or store, you know that it’s not realistic to reduce wait times for customers in every circumstance. If your company is one that prides itself on impressive and personalized service for every customer, wait times are inevitable. There are ways, however, to create more enjoyable waits for customers, and generate additional sales at the same time.

Developing customized mystery shopping programs across many industries has allowed us to see a variety of wait time strategies.  Through measurement of these strategies and our own observations, here are ways that some organizations convert tiresome wait times into positive customer experiences:

• Automotive or food service companies arrange retail space so that customers view the employees working, whether it an associate who cooks a food order, or an employee who repairs or washes your vehicle.  This is a great way to show customers the quality behind your service while at the same time eliminating boring waits.
• At some Chick Fil-a locations, employees stand near the drive thru entry point and key in orders with

When you think about mobile devices and their impact on the in-person customer experience, have you considered that nearly 2 billion people will have Smartphones by 2017? If not, you should!

You should also consider how your employees serve these distracted customers.

• Do your new accounts personnel approach waiting customers, only to find them with their heads down, texting away?
• Do your servers wait for diners to look up from their cell phones?
• Do your retail associates stand awkwardly while a distracted cell phone talker holds up the line?

From restaurants to banks to retail stores and beyond, busy associates encounter the same challenge – customers who multi -task with cell phone conversations, texting or using an Ipad. In response to this growing phenomenon, we wanted to take a closer look at the ways that distracted customers impact customer experience in these industries.

Mobile-crazed Diners

Rather than embracing mobile trends, some restaurants simply ask customers not to use their cell phones inside their locations. For example,