What is a “mystery shopper?” Despite the provocative name, it’s quite simply a hired individual posing as a customer to evaluate your restaurant. A spy – unknown to your staff – conducts an unbiased observation of staff performance, along with other key aspects of the dining experience. The objective is NOT to find reasons to punish your employees, but something that provides significant value: identification of business pitfalls that when addressed, lead to improved marketing strategies, thereby increasing sales.
Hiring a mystery shopper is a valuable tool for monitoring and evaluating restaurant operations. In a fast-paced environment with multiple services to coordinate with a constant flow of new and returning customers, it can be difficult for management to maintain an objective perspective.
A mystery shopper provides a unique opportunity to acquire impartial feedback on typical customer experiences. By obtaining a better understanding of the overall performance of hosts, servers, kitchen staff, bartenders, – even parking valets – restaurant managers can identity priorities for improvement to keep the profits rolling in.
For example, mystery shopper data can minimize loss prevention through the investigation of questions such as:
In some cases, you can even create a “stress test.” For instance, how does your staff respond to a rude diner? By studying the results of contrived scenarios, you can adjust training to improve employee response to difficult situations.
The first step is to decide exactly what you’d like to measure and how you want to use the data. The best place to start is to answer some tough questions about the state of your current operations, such as:
Above all else, BE SPECIFIC. If you set out to observe everything, your feedback is most likely going to be too general or overwhelming to help you focus on priorities. A day or two before the visit, provide your mystery shopper with a precise agenda to focus on. Ask for OBJECTIVE OBSERVATIONS rather than SUBJECTIVE EVALUATIONS. The mystery shopper provides the data; management decides whether it’s “good” or bad” and how to use it.
The following outlines a number of questions to prepare before hiring a mystery shopper. Being prepared with the variables you care about is key to successfully using the data gathered from the mystery shopper.
This category can be problematic. As we know, taste is entirely subjective. If you want mystery shoppers to evaluate the taste of food and beverages, emphasize that they should not think of themselves as food critics, and therefore, should avoid adjectives such as “good” or “bad.” Instead, have them choose more observational terms, such as: salty, sweet, flavorful, balanced, imbalanced, bland, fresh, burnt, spoiled, undercooked, overcooked, and so forth.
It’s not the job of the mystery shopper to make recommendations, rather, management digests the data then determines next steps. Negative observations can raise red flags for your restaurant business. Use them to see how you can improve staff training, infrastructure, and marketing efforts. Don’t use them to discipline employees, and leverage the positive observations to provide employee recognition. Remember that incentives create change better and faster than demerits.
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