The ‘Mystery’ Of Managing Your Staff!!

Studies continue to prove that very good service is still the exception. Unfortunately customer expectations are higher than ever before. With fierce competition in today’s forefront, companies realize that marketing campaigns, new products, or price wars, won’t win the war for market share. The secret to winning is customer service. You can not simply expect to meet customer expectations in order to retain their business. You must exceed their expectations! “Whereas clients previously tried to ensure their customers were treated well, over the past two years companies have revised their employee evaluation programs to ensure that their staff are ‘WOWING’ their customers”.

Mystery Shopping is a viable option that has been used by restaurant operators for over 20 years. Mystery Shoppers provide anonymous customers to dine in your restaurant and provide unbiased and detailed information about their entire experience. Evaluations effectively measure the gap between the standards you have set, and what is ACTUALLY being delivered to your customers by your employees. You are able to assess exactly how your staff are providing ‘the experience’, but equally as important, how the customers actually perceive your service.

Mystery Shopping offers many advantages over alternate methods of measuring customer satisfaction. The evaluations are based on a scoring system. Remember …. “You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure!” Assessments must be quantifiable for you to benchmark your current staff performance levels, and determine if you are progressing, remaining stagnant, or getting worse. Evaluations should be qualified - they should contain detailed comments that specifically offer a full account of the customer experience. The problem with other programs, (eg. comment cards), other than lacking the comprehensive detail (mystery shopping reports can exceed 40 pages) is that only a few patrons fill them out, of which many only offer comments when they have something nice to say. The rest simply don’t want to take the time. Recent polls show that the average business never hears from 96% of their unhappy customers. For every complaint received, a business has 26 complaints that go unreported.

Mystery Shopping is an extremely valuable tool, and one of many integral components that should be considered for achieving success in your employee management process. Mystery Shopping is an invaluable tool which enables you to assess performance among your employees more accurately, and with more detail than any other method tried”. Some managers compare sales figures to statistics from previous years. If the sales figures are similar, they might believe staff are performing okay. The advantage of assessing ongoing performance of your employees, is not comparing today’s figures (what is finished) to those in the past (both of which you have no control over), but more importantly identifying potential for specific employees to achieve greater sales, and improved customer service skills in the future. “In order to realize the maximum benefit from your program, managers must then know how to act on the information received” adds Shuster.

Managing employees is like driving a school bus. Some students are in the right seat. Others are on the right bus, but need to be moved to a different seat (improper jobfit). The rest are ultimately on the wrong bus and need to get off! Because there is no individual method to achieve perfection, every manager should use a variety of tools to improve the success rate when deciding who to let on your bus, who to move to a different seat, and who should get off! Mystery shopping is one tool proven to achieve great success.

Written by: Michael Shuster, President: HIDDEN CONCEPTS INC.

His expertise encompasses strategic employee attraction and hiring processes, sales & customer service training, ongoing employee performance management, and curriculum design. His goal setting, coaching programs, and tracking formulas, have been used by managers within over 250 organizations across North America, to successfully inspire and achieve excellence at hiring and managing top performers!



The ‘Mystery’ Of Managing Your Staff!! - To learn more about this author, visit Michael Shuster's Website.

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