Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor® blog at Retaildoc.com

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Did you catch the coverage of President Obama’s burger run to Five Guys in Washington a month or so ago?  USA Today did a great profile on the franchise here.

One of the big reasons Five Guys is wildly successful?  “To ensure quality control, Five Guys sends secret shoppers twice a week to all locations. The brothers also are on the road constantly visiting the restaurants.”  Five Guys knows you need to inspect what you expect.

High standards each and every day ensure the right employees do the right things. Training new employees to 100% and then making them work for managers who don’t run the shifts up to high standards is spinning your company’s wheels and lowering the brand perception in customers’ eyes. That means it destroys profits. There’s only one way to avoid that: an ongoing program of mystery shops.

The number one thing business owners tell me is, “I just need more customers.”  Wrong, you need them to return. You can’t attract your whole neighborhood to try you, deliver lousy results and expect just getting “more bodies in the door” will work.  You can burn through a neighborhood with bad word-of-mouth and, without mystery shoppers, never know it.

Five Guys franchise with 436 locations sees the value in nearly 50,000 shops in a year, shouldn’t you? Oh right, the money.

You might not blink at spending $500 per month in advertising, but balk at spending a fraction of that on measuring customers’ experience in your store.  That’s just plain dumb.  The profit comes from the people wanting to return, not the discount promotions you run to entice new shoppers.

And please, get out of the idea that mystery shops are a way to spy on employees for compliance.  That’s what they’ll think if you don’t present it correctly.  It’s also what many lesser services use as their logo. If you want to fire someone, you don’t need a mystery shop to prove it.

Here’s the thing, if you aren’t servicing your customers the way they believe you should, you open the door to competitors eager to take your business.  It’s not what your regulars tell you, its what the new customers tell you that matters most.

Benefits of mystery shops:

• Monitored and measured service performance
• Improves customer retention
• Makes employees aware of what is important in serving customers
• Monitors facility conditions
• Ensures product/service delivery quality.
• Supports promotional programs
• Allows for competitive analyses between locations
• Identifies training needs and sales opportunities
• Ensures positive customer relationships on the front line.
• Enforces employee integrity and knowledge.
• Supports hustle by employees to meet customers. See previous post.

But not all mystery shopping companies are the same. Far from it!  One client of mine told me how he found the shoppers had never even BEEN to his store. Another said she’d tried it but it “didn’t work.”  When I looked at her survey it came screaming off the page why it wasn’t successful because every question was subjective. “Did you feel valued as a guest?” “Did they attempt to meet your needs?” “Did you feel welcomed?” Shoot me.

What would feedback have looked like to the employee who got a low score on her shop? “Gee Sally, the customer didn’t feel valued as a guest. Try harder.”  Reminds me of the old days in chorus when the conductor yelled at us to “sing in tune.” If we knew how to do that, we would have done it.

Questions on a mystery shop need to be black and white. The server either did or didn’t say, “Good morning, good afternoon or good evening.”  ”Did the salesman describe a product using features  (it has) with the benefits (to the customer.)”  In addition, you need a narrative so compelling you can actually see the transaction in your store.

I work with clients to get their mystery shopper surveys just right and actionable. One client with 14 locations is now tops in her franchise; another’s average check continues to rise. Is it a mystery? Nope, a mystery shop.

To succeed in a recession, as competitors cry the blues and leave your market, you need to consistently provide clear expectations and demanding high standards of employees.  After all, your customers deserve, and pay for those.

Cutting another shift or saving ten cents on freight is like a poor marksman looking at the edge of the target.  The real money is on the bull’s eye of selling the customer.

Learn more about the Retail Doctor’s mystery shopping secret weapon by contacting him.

From The Retail Doctor’s Guide To Growing Your Business to be published by Wiley & Sons mid-2010
© Bob Phibbs 2009

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