Advantages of Mystery Shopping

How Mystery Shopping can identify the small things so that your customers leave on a high and not on a sigh!

This was my lunch earlier this week. After several attempts to open the ‘sachets of dread’, I went without vinegar. For my life! I don’t know why we still have these tiny packets of frustration. I don’t know the percentage of the human race that can open them, but it must be under 5%, surely.

Advantages of Mystery Shopping

 

I don’t know who I blame more when I see these; the supplier or the eatery that serves them. I have eaten in a pub that supplied scissors in the condiment box alongside them. At the time, I thought it was a genius idea but it was probably just relief. 🙃

Last week we stayed in a recently refurbished, beautiful, pub B&B. Breakfast service was painfully slow, with us having to get up to ask for every element that wasn’t readily available: bread, milk, tea, orange juice, sugar etc. When the sugar eventually arrived, it was sugar lumps, plus parts thereof, in a tiny Kilner jar that required fingers the size of a Tinkerbell to extract them. We watched our guest sigh heavily as he struggled to exhume a lump, and a bit, from the tiny jar and wait for it to dissolve in his tea. We burst out laughing at his internal frustration because although it seemed pernickety, the reality is that we all understood exactly how he felt.

It’s the small things that are often overlooked because they seem trivial to the service provider, but they can remain as a lasting memory, and not for the right reasons.

Mystery shoppers identify the small things that matter so that your customers leave on a high and not on a sigh!

If you would like to find out more about how we can help your business please don’t hesitate to get in touch with one of the team.

Share:

Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook

Related Posts

Advantages of Mystery Shopping

How Mystery Shopping can identify the small things so that your customers leave on a high and not on a sigh! This was my lunch earlier this week. After several attempts to open the ‘sachets of dread’, I went without vinegar. For my life! I don’t know why we still have these tiny packets of frustration. I don’t know the percentage of the human race that can open them, but it must be under 5%,

Read More »

Why Customer Surveys Won’t Tell You The Truth

In the hospitality industry the dropout rate for customer surveys, which take 10+ minutes, is around 30–40%.  For shorter, well-designed surveys, dropout rates are still typically around 20–30%. What’s the impact of this? Well, you might say that ‘it doesn’t matter if some customers drop out as we have plenty that do complete them’. But what you may not be factoring in is that many customers lose interest and click at random to get through

Read More »

Vegan and Vegetarian Mystery Shoppers

How important is it for restaurants to provide vegan and vegetarian options? We have silent customers turn down visits because there aren’t enough veggie options on the menus. Searches for vegan restaurants in the UK have tripled over a four-year period, from 60,000 in 2017 to over 200,000 in 2020, highlighting the rising interest in plant-based dining options Food that doesn’t contain bits of animals isn’t a fad. And don’t assume that a roasted cauliflower or

Read More »

Mystery Shoppers for London Based Businesses

Grow Your Business with Silent Customer London’s dynamic and competitive environment makes it essential for businesses – whether you’re a pub, hotel group, bowling alley, or aesthetic clinic to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Standing out in such a fast-paced city requires a deep understanding of your customers’ needs and expectations. Mystery shoppers for London based businesses can offer valuable insights that keep you ahead of the competition, enhancing your brand’s reputation and helping you thrive.

Read More »

How the Expectations of Customer Experience Have Risen: Why, and What to do About it

Once upon a time, I used to say that to be a successful restaurant, you needed to excel in at least one of these three categories.   Food Service Ambience   But, back then, pre-Brexit, people were more forgiving, because eating out was cheaper, drinking alcohol was still cool, and we didn’t have weight loss drugs.         So now what?  Now F&B businesses need to ace at all three and offer more besides.

Read More »

Mystery Shopping Benefits for Medical Aesthetic Clinics

We have taken on a new client who has medical aesthetic clinics.  Before we even managed to fulfil our first visit, we discovered that WhatsApp enquiries weren’t being responded to and phone calls were not being picked up or followed-up. Our client was pretty disappointed. But they shouldn’t be:  Humans are, in general, pretty lazy. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t have invented farming and the internet. That neither have, in the long game, reduced work levels

Read More »

Reputation Management

Mystery Visits

Phone & Online Audits

Free Training Tools

Free Training Tools

Intercepting Complaints

Check-backs and complaint handling go hand in hand. Intercepting a problem before a customer tells you, or Google, not only prevents negative word-of-mouth but can increase revenue through loyalty and positive PR.

Use our fun PEP talk sheets to support your front-line teams in learning how to avoid complaints.

Engaging Conversations

Building a natural and genuine rapport with guests can be the most positive and memorable part of their dining experience. Whilst the food and the environment can be remarkable by itself, making a customer feel that they are more than just a table number, has a far wider reach in terms of spreading positive word-of-mouth.

Use our fun PEP talk sheet to support your front-line teams in learning how to have engaging conversations.

Positive Body Language

Being able to communicate positivity, and with enthusiasm, encourages customers to reciprocate in the same manner. However, most of us are unaware of how we are perceived by others and, whilst we may think we are coming across as welcoming and friendly, our body language could be telling a different story.

Use our fun PEP talk sheet to support your front-line teams in understand the importance of self-awareness.

Relevant Recommendations

Team members need good product knowledge to be able to describe and enthuse, but often don’t know what many of the dishes taste like. A lack of upselling is also often due to a lack of confidence in knowing where to start a conversation that leads to a recommendation.

Use our fun PEP talk sheet to support your front-line teams in learning how to upsell.