Mystery Shopping Benefits

With a comprehensive mystery shopping program through ReflectionsMS, your restaurant can realize a wide range of benefits while evaluating guest service, product knowledge, sales efforts, product quality, and store appearance. Detailed customer feedback from our trained shoppers provides unique perspectives and enhances your competitive edge.

There are many measurable ways mystery shopping can affect your business' bottom line. A properly designed mystery shopping program which sets clear standards, provides crew incentives and communicates results can increase sales, cut costs, and improve the guest experience. The following points detail how these benefits can be achieved.

• Increase Average Check Total 

By setting a standard of "upselling", and monitoring the compliance using our mystery shoppers, a business can raise its average check total. This alone can pay for the cost of a comprehensive program! A mystery shopping program can also help determine if specials are being described in an appealing manner to further increase the average check.

• Gain Crew Awareness of Standards

The feedback you receive from our mystery shopping program continually reinforces operational and training standards among crew members and assists in incorporating these standards into a bonus and/or recognition program. When your crew and management understand, accept and focus on set standards, this will translate into lower turnover and an increase in productivity.

• Encourage Excellence

ReflectionsMS provides comprehensive reports that rank and trend store, region, district and company-wide performance in customer service, product quality, and location appearance/atmosphere. This helps drive competition among stores and regions, thus increasing productivity and improving guests' overall experiences. All results are available online via our web site anytime you need them.

• Research at a Lower Cost

Mystery shopping can provide feedback on specific products or menu items, thereby saving marketing dollars on costly focus groups. ReflectionsMS can develop special evaluations to be implemented over a specific period of time or in a specific region to measure the guests' perception of a new item. This can provide valuable product information before a full release of a new item. We can also implement additional shops at new or under-performing locations to provide more detailed information about strengths and opportunities for improvement.

• Monitor Cost Controls

ReflectionsMS can assist with cost controls. Our shoppers can determine if all items were charged correctly and included on the bill. They can also determine if proper change is given, thus identifying another potential source of "shortage". Such problems can be easily corrected with careful monitoring and follow-up.

• Improve Guest Experiences

The most apparent benefit of a mystery shopping program is the opportunity for improvement in guest service and the guest's general experience. This leads to increased repeat and referral business. Overall satisfaction questions can be asked in an evaluation. Our shoppers can describe the most pleasing aspect of their experience, what they feel could be improved, and whether they would recommend the establishment to others. Other comments throughout the evaluation also allow you to see how each store could have improved their score and the guest's experience.

• Evaluate Product Quality

The consistency of product quality over time and between stores is simply monitored with a mystery shopping program. This will draw attention to inadvertent changes in cooking and food storage procedures for restaurants.

• Maintain Management Visibility

Our mystery shoppers can note whether the manager is visible in the location. Does he or she interact with the guests? An active and visible manager will improve the performance of the crew and generally increase guest satisfaction.

We provide custom services to companies throughout the United States and Canada. Our programs are designed to assist our clients in meeting their performance, training and sales objectives.

We are proud to have a database of more than 25,000 experienced shoppers available to shop our clients' locations. Our shoppers are fully informed about every aspect of the "evaluation" that they are to conduct. Our shoppers will provide complete, accurate and reliable information. This factual information provides our clients with an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. A company with the ability to identify and correct its weaknesses as well as identify and leverage its strengths will maintain a competitive advantage over its competition.

Our shoppers receive specific and detailed instructions and guidelines for each assignment they perform. We ensure they understand the operational standards for each question on the evaluation so they know specifically what to look for when performing the mystery shop. Our staff is always available to answer questions and to review client standards with our shoppers.

We provide our shoppers with ongoing feedback regarding their performance. When we find areas where our shoppers can improve their work, we contact them. We ensure that they understand what to improve or change as well as what they are doing well. Many times, a client's standards change or a client becomes aware of a special situation. When this occurs, we communicate this information to a specific shopper, group of shoppers or to all shoppers, as appropriate.

• Internal Quality Checks

An extremely important process to ensure a quality evaluation is our internal quality check. We review each evaluation thoroughly to be sure it is filled out completely and accurately. This ensures that the evaluations meet both our internal and our client's standards. If any comment needs clarification, we contact our shoppers for additional information. If a completed evaluation does not meet our standards, it will not be used.

• Shopper Rating System

ReflectionsMS utilizes a shopper rating system to track the quality and timeliness of our shopper's work. Shoppers with the highest ratings get priority in receiving assignments. Shoppers whose ratings fall below a certain level are no longer used. Our shoppers are rotated and are not permitted to return to a location for 90 days after completing an evaluation.

• Close Client Relationships

ReflectionsMS is devoted to making our clients happy. Maintaining good, solid relationships with our clients helps us provide great customer service.

• Define evaluation standards and program goals

We work with each client to develop their evaluation form and define the standards for each question on the evaluation. During this process, we focus on the goals of their program and how the results will be used. This helps us know exactly what our clients need from us and ensures from the outset that our shoppers receive the best, most detailed information to assist them in performing their shops. To do this, our staff reviews the evaluation question by question and works with the client to obtain all operational specifications and standards. We come up with as many exceptions and "what if" scenarios as possible. We can then refine the standards for our shoppers and have the information on hand so we know how to handle special situations.

• Continual communication with clients

Once the mystery shopping program has been implemented, it is essential that we maintain communication with our clients to continually monitor the program and ensure it is meeting their needs and objectives. If a unique or unusual situation arises, we alert our client to learn the best way to handle the problem.

• Encourage feedback from clients

We are happy to meet our client's requests to provide feedback to our shoppers, change scores on evaluations when special circumstances arise, and remove shoppers from a rotation for shopping a particular location(s).

Each client will have a full-time account manager. Nothing is more important to us than your satisfaction. It is crucial that your mystery shopping program meets your objectives. It is our job to ensure that this happens!

For more information about ReflectionsMS and how we can help you achieve your business objectives, please contact:

Kim Combs
1-503-928-6028
KimCombs@ReflectionsMS.com