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Mystery Diners – Provenance, Price of Personality
With money-off meals promotions flooding the internet and stiff competition between rival companies, it would be easy to think that the focus of the high street restaurant sector has shifted to cut-prices at the expense of good quality customer service. Elizabeth Troake returns to the world of the mystery shopper to find out where priorities in the sector really lie.
A couple of years ago, The Appointment investigated the role of the mystery shopper. At the time, the retail and hospitality industries were thriving and the dark clouds of recession had yet to burst. Customers had the leisure of being able to make choices based not on price, but on perceived quality, customer experience and the origins of products - otherwise known as the "p" word; "provenance".
Meanwhile, restaurants had the budget to spend on increasing customer retention through quality of dining experience as price became a secondary consideration for many customers. But in recent times priorities for consumers have changed considerably and the restaurant sector has certainly felt the brunt of cutbacks in consumer spending; the closure of many sites and even whole chains is evidence of this.
Surviving companies are pitted against each other and the most important "p" word became "price" as prolific money-off promotions exploded onto the scene. This may or may not have buoyed up their flagging profits, but what I wanted to know was this; has customer service become the first victim of the current price war? To answer this question, I needed the help of people who have seen the customer service face of the restaurant business up close and personal. So, I turned to The Mystery Leisure Company for help and in particular to its founder, Sally Whelan (pictured).
With a true blue-ribbon background in food as well as hospitality and leisure, (she not only helped to pioneer Tesco's Finest range, but also established a food-related consultancy and worked on Virgin Atlantic's food and drinks offering) Sally is the ideal person to know about trends in the restaurant business. Her company works with high street names including Dim T, Harvey Nichols, Wagamama and Food & Fuel. Every month The Mystery Leisure Company (TMLC) sends out 1,000 trained assessors to judge a restaurant on whatever criteria the client specifies and reports are sent back to the client within 24 hours.
I caught up with Sally to visit a restaurant in order to get the feel of a "mystery dine" from the front line, as it were - surely this would provide some answers.
But does a professional assessor have the same priorities as the typical diner, I wondered. Sally was quick to allay these concerns.
"We don't use so-called "professional" mystery diners as is common in the mystery shopping sector," she explained. "We don't generally pay our assessors so the motivation is merely a love of dining out.
"We make a detailed profile of our assessors before we send them on a mystery dining visit," she continued. "As well as taking into account their standard demographics, we like to know details on their lifestyle and dining habits so that we can give our clients access to assessors who fit their target market. We find that this allows assessors to feel more comfortable and concentrate on the details they will need in order to complete their report and it gives the client a more accurate picture of how they are seen from a customer's viewpoint."
The mystery diner begins at a "trainee" level, but if they take on assignments regularly and submit accurate, good quality reports (each of which is monitored by administrators in the company's Bath HQ), they can "rise through the ranks" and at the higher levels get the first pick of assignments. And assessors have to be pretty dedicated - at The Mystery Leisure Company they are reimbursed for the expenses of the visit, but are not paid, further ensuring a higher quality of assessor.
Added to this, reports for an overnight stay in a hotel can include a questionnaire of up to 170 pages including tick-boxes on whatever aspect the company wants to specifically investigate, as well as further comments on aspects of the service, ambience, food and décor of the venue.
However, despite assessors being profiled and selected according to their "fit" with the company's target market, assessors can't re-visit venues within a specified time period in order to preserve their anonymity as a mystery diner. The selection process is so tailored that clients can even pick out assessors with hospitality and leisure experience, or even individual assessors should they wish.
I asked Sally what impact the downturn has had on the way clients use TMLC's services. What are the clients looking for from their mystery dining reports? And has this changed in the last two years? As it turns out, according to Sally, the customer's dining experience is more important to restaurants now than it has ever been.
"In both staff and company branding, personality is the key nowadays - adding an extra level to the service that the customer may not experience at a competitor", Sally told me.
"One of the biggest changes we have seen over the last two years is that, whereas it used to be operations directors and managers who used to commission and liaise with us on mystery visit schemes, it's shifted to marketing, or some joint responsibility between the two.
"Of course, the marketing department wants to look at it from a different point of view to an ops team. The ops teams want to make sure the basics are in place, the restaurant is set up ready for service and staffed appropriately, that sort of thing, whereas the marketing team want to make sure you feel good about your visit, that you feel better when you leave than when you walked in."
She added that one of the most important aspects of any mystery dining report and the one that clients are most interested in is the "return and recommend" question. It seems that, having shifted from "provenance" to "price", the new "p" word of the moment is now "personality".
So there we have it. Not only is the desire to give customers a great experience alive and well in our high street eateries, but it is more so than ever.
However, back to the mystery dine at hand...Maybe it was the presence of the Dictaphone on the table, or maybe it was because the restaurant is one of a very few trial sites, but the smiling and enquiring visits of the waitress, the assistant manager and finally the manager seemed to become more frequent as our meal drew to a close. It seemed that we had have been rumbled on this occasion.
And the name of the restaurant we visited? Well, I'd love to tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
