I’ve noticed that many retail companies want to focus primarily on top box results when using a mystery shopper program. I too believe in focusing on excellence and establishing a top box goal (for those wondering, top box means the highest score possible on any particular question. If the measuring system of your mystery shopper program uses Excellent, Good, Fair and Poor, Excellent would be the top box). It makes all the sense in the world to focus on excellence and best practices to deliver top notch customer service. By having a top box goal and getting our entire team focused on excellence, the hope is that we will raise the overall level of our operation. If we aim for excellence but miss the bullseye (Excellent), the hope is we still hit the target (Good). But can we consider ourselves successful at achieving overall guest satisfaction if we simply reach our top box goal?  Not necessarily.

Our Experience …

We put together an employee incentive contest to get everyone focused on “Friendliness of Employees”. We wanted to identify and recognize the friendliest restaurant in our company based on guest feedback. We focused on top box results and the winner would be the restaurant that had the highest top box result. At the end of the contest period, the winning restaurant had a top box score of almost 70% in the Friendliness of Employees category. The Restaurant GM did an outstanding job of getting most of her crew fired up about the details of delivering excellent service. It worked as a lot of her previous “Good” responses moved into the “Excellent” column. BUT as I looked at the overall results I thought it was interesting how low the “Good” results were. As I looked closer, I noticed that even though we had a high top box rating, we had too many negative responses. As a matter of fact, 15% of our guests had a negative response under friendliness of employees. Can we be satisfied with a high top box rating if we are negatively impacting 15% of our guests? Of course not! How can we have such a good top box score and, during the same period, negatively impact so many guests? I needed to learn more.

Preferred Feedback allows us the ability to quickly run a query and get to the root of a problem area. I simply told the system I only wanted to see results using surveys of mystery shoppers that had a negative response on “Friendliness of Employees”. The surveys associated with the query popped up for me to view. When using the Preferred Feedback system, you can see the receipt associated with each survey that is filled out. I noticed that, on most of the receipts, the name of the person logged into the register and taking the order was “Rita”. Within a couple of minutes I made an enlightening discovery. It wasn’t that our employees were not friendly 15% of the time, we had ONE employee in a key customer contact position that was negatively impacting 15% of our guests! In this case, we were able to take care of this critical area by simply reassigning “Rita” to a different position in the restaurant where there was no direct customer contact. Now we were delivering guest satisfaction at the level we were envisioning!

PREFERRED POINTER: The Preferred Feedback system allows you the ability to easily view top box and negative response results. Set a top box goal so that everyone is focused on excellence but also put emphasis on and tie any incentive program into minimizing negative responses. This will get your entire team focused on excellence but they will not loose sight of the fact that we must deliver an acceptable level of service to every guest. The Preferred Feedback team would be happy to help you design an effective employee incentive program. Call toll free at 1-877-838-3996 or go to www.preferredfeedback.com