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Pizzeria owners can’t be everywhere at once, so how can you ensure your employees are courteous, efficient and honest? More and more operators are turning to mystery shoppers, professional researchers who are paid to patronize your business and write a detailed report about their experience in your store. The practice is ever growing, according to Business Wire’s Market Size Report. Between 70 and 80 percent of all quick service restaurants are now using some sort of mystery shopper service, making it a $600 million business nationwide.
Get Your Shop On
Who are these shoppers? Sixty-eight percent are women over 30 years old with annual household incomes of over $50,000. Seventy-two percent have attended college. Over 30 percent are professional researchers who work full-time for other research companies. The pay averages $15 per assignment (plus reimbursement for the meal), and aggressive shoppers can get up to 20 assignments per month. Mystery shopping experts say the industry has undergone a renaissance lately due to technology: with email, wireless internet and faxing, reports can now be issued to restaurants within 24 hours making mystery shopping a very real-time improvement tool allowing for on the spot fixes.
Brad Holdgreve is vice president of Corporate Research International of Findlay, Ohio, a mystery shopping service that posted revenues of $1 million last year. Among CRI’s clients are CiCi’s Pizza. Brad says his company is flexible enough to shape its reports to accommodate what an individual operator might be looking for.
“Each client is different, customer service might be important to one client, cleanliness another,” Brad says. “The majority are looking at cleanliness, customer service, product, employee appearance, and were they treated friendly. These are the most common aspects operators want feedback on. The shopper might have to take a digital photo of something, maybe the product, or sometimes if the sign is out, they’d take a photo of that and submit a written report.”
So how does his company hire people to shop? “We recruit our shoppers through online web advertising, local newspapers, and over the phone,” he replies. “The age group ranges anywhere from 18 to 70 and we even have people in their 80s. We get about 200 requests everyday from people wanting to be shoppers. Our database, just in the U.S. and North America, is just over 300,000 and 350,000 worldwide.
“We have 250 clients and some we shop five times a month. We feel like the information gathered from all these shops tells an operator where they might need to spend money, be it on more training or hiring training.”
A Closer Look
In the mystery shopping business since 1994, A Closer Look at their sister company, Wise Shops, which focuses on smaller businesses, now have 28 employees and 100,000 shoppers nationwide shopping at over 100 businesses, both single and franchised. The company is located in Waycross, Georgia, near Atlanta. Chuck Paul and David McAleese co-founded A Closer Look. George Petrick joined in 2003 to redesign the software and upgrade the company’s extensive database of shoppers.
Chuck says the most important aspect – and sometimes the most troubling – is the shopper’s ability to write reports clearly and on time. “The majority of our employees we call ‘editors,’” Chuck says. “After the report is completed online by the shopper, it goes to an editor who has our info and guidelines. The editor makes sure the report has a narrative, all the subjective and objective aspects are there and that they match. We double check it before it gets moved on to the client.”
Chuck says the small business owner can expect to pay $50 for a one-time mystery shop. “The $50 for a mystery shop includes the report,” he notes. “They get a lot of information from the report. We have a generic form that we can customize to answer specific questions within reason. We have about 25 different generic forms to cover different types of restaurants: fast casual, upscale, strictly casual dining with or without a bar, and pizza take out. The form is generic but the guidelines can be massaged for the operator. The shopper is reimbursed by us usually within 30 days.”
Chuck says among the questions on the form are, “Did the crew member have a smile in their voice? Did the crew member know the specials and describe them well? Was a special offer visible when you entered the store?” More specific questions would cover dough temperature and whether or not you would buy the same pizza again, he said.
Although getting paid to shop sounds like a dream job to many, Chuck says a good mystery shopper is often a rare commodity. “It’s hard to recruit good shoppers. A lot of people say they want to shop, but getting people who are really good at it and are timely with their reports is hard to find. So many don’t have time to put the report together. We send out notices everyday and try to follow-up on it. If the reports don’t get filed, we don’t do the reimbursement.”
Chuck says demands for his company’s services and others like it have skyrocketed thanks to technology.
“Email and fax have revolutionized our industry,” Chuck declares. “Now we can guarantee 24 to 48 hour turnaround. We don’t usually have any trouble with the accuracy of our shoppers’ reports. Only about five percent of the time do we have to send one back for clarification.”
Chuck says it’s important to give potential mystery shoppers a dry run before actually hiring them. “One of the things we do, we test our new shoppers over the Internet,” he explains. “Our test is thought provoking and common sense. We ask them to write about a service experience they’ve had recently or a casual dining experience. We want to see if they can relate a dining experience in clear, concise sentences. They also need to be able to spell and use good grammar.”
Another Tool in the Toolbox
Mystery shopping, while valuable for operations evaluation, will never completely replace comment cards and verbal feedback. Eric Scoggin, COO of four Papa Murphy’s stores in Kansas, explains that information gathered from a mystery shopper is just one piece of a very large and complicated puzzle.
“In general, I feel that if properly designed and properly used, mystery shops can be beneficial,” he says. “However, I consider shops to be ‘another tool in the toolbox.’ Shops are only a tool. They are NOT a silver bullet or an all-encompassing solution to any problem. Although shoppers’ reports can and should offer richer detail (compared to other methods of measuring results) as to the specifics of the results noted, a shopper’s report on one of my stores is just another data point to work from in an effort to measure, manage, and maintain great operations.
“A circular saw is a great tool, but buying one is not going to get your lumber cut to the right size - you’re going to have to apply the saw to the wood at just the right spot and handle it with skill in order to get the desired result of properly sized, neatly cut lumber.”
At $50 a pop, does Eric believe mystery shops give good bang for the buck?
“As for cost-effectiveness, I place a considerable value on motivating the people running these stores. Knowing that the next guest walking in might be a mystery shopper can be a factor in encouraging our people to be on their best behavior. There is also value in unfiltered, honest feedback.”
More Mystery
The use of mystery shoppers has grown in recent years and will continue to do so according to Mystery Shoppers Providers Association, (MSPA), an industry trade group. “Almost everyone involved in the mystery shopping industry has experienced tremendous growth in recent years,” said John Swinburn, MSPA Executive Director. “As the flagship trade organization for the mystery shopping industry, the MSPA decided to quantify that growth. We commissioned a report to tell us where the industry stands right now. The results outline exactly what we expected - a large and growing industry with exciting prospects for the future.”
Swinnburn says that companies that participated in the report experienced an average growth of 11.1 percent from 2003 to 2004 and the average growth in the number of shops during that period was 12.2 percent. The report estimates more than 8.1 million mystery shops were conducted in 2004.
All those millions of shops resulted in a growing wealth of information and data that can be of invaluable use to operators of any size and location. For example, Swinburn said mystery reports have shown an area where all pizzerias can improve – upselling.
“One of our studies showed that 77 percent of our shoppers said the counter person they dealt with failed to mention other items for purchase,” Swinburn notes. “Upselling is a stand out area where stores can improve. It is a critical revenue-generating behavior that needs to be reinforced by employees.”