Some companies prefer to conduct a pilot before entering into a full-scale mystery shopping program. This is a great way fine-tune your mystery shop program and to narrow down exactly what your team would like to accomplish by using mystery shopping reports as a way to measure employee behaviors and front line performance.

A pilot mystery shopping study will help you determine and finalize your goals. Results of a pilot program give your management team a chance to fine tune the program questions, the expected outcomes and the potential communication about the program with employees. Here are some things to consider when putting together a pilot mystery shopping study:

1) Test All Unit Types: Think about conducting shops randomly across your footprint during the pilot. It may be tempting to test within a defined area, such as one region. If this approach is taken, make sure that one region contains all types of location configurations and any potential one-offs. If your company operates with freestanding units, in-lines, on military bases, in institutional settings, in limited service settings or within airports, make sure that selected test region has units meeting those criteria. An alternative choice is to conduct pilot shops randomly across with footprint, to include all unit configuration types. Testing in all unit types allows your company to get a feel for results in all venues and in all circumstances.

2) Employee Training: Consider employee training. You will be measuring employee success in exhibiting certain behaviors, so consider carefully what your company has trained your employees to do. If your company has not trained employees to, for example, shake hands when they meet a new customer, and that is an important goal for your company’s customer service delivery, then another important step will need to be added to your pilot process. Employees will need to know both that the behavior is expected and exactly how to do it.

3) Define Your Terms: Many terms used in customer service are not truly interchangeable. The words “friendly” and “courteous” are not the same thing. When descriptive words are used within the program, determine what those words mean for the program, so that both employees and mystery shoppers will easily understand the standard. For example, if you’re focusing on a friendly greeting, you may need to define this with specific behaviors such as smiling and making eye contact.

4) Benchmark the Pilot or Openly Communicate?: Think about whether you will communicate your pilot program to your front line staff or if you will keep it anonymous. If you keep it anonymous, you will benchmark what employees are doing without knowing that a measurement program is in place, providing good data for tracking your progress when your program rolls out to the entire footprint. If you do decide to communicate that mystery shoppers are coming into units, you’re taking the first step toward preparing employees for a renewed focus on company expectations.

5) Location Access: If your locations have drive through service, consider if you would like to measure service and sales expectations at this point of service delivery. When determining the mix of drive through vs. walk in, consider the amount of business that comes from each area. If more customers use your drive through, you’ll want to weight the mix more heavily toward those locations during your pilot.

6) Timing: What are the different times during the day that your company would like to measure service levels and/or sales efforts? Busy or slow? Early in the day or late at night? A sampling of different times?

7) Plan for Change: When the pilot results become available, be prepared to make adjustments to the program. The shopper questionnaire, the standards and the approach may all need to be adjusted to set the program on the right course. After the program is launched across the footprint, be prepared to make adjustment periodically, as your company’s standards, competitive circumstances and customer expectations change.

These are just a few factors to think about in planning a mystery shopping program pilot study. If you take some time to think about these ideas and others, you will be well on your way to having a more effective pilot, and ultimately, a more successful mystery shop program.