Measuring Service Delivery

How do you know what your customers think about the quality of your food and drink delivery and service?
There are a several ways that are often used to get this feedback.
A popular technique is in seeking customers’ views through customer feedback questionnaires and these can provide some useful pointers. However to make use of the data you really need a large sample and even then you can often find that the majority of responses are either from very happy or very unhappy customers. They often do not capture the views of the “silent majority” and are therefore sometimes difficult to use when trying to raise standards and address real issues.
Equally you can of course ask customers yourself and many good managers and staff do develop a good interaction with their customers.  However such feedback is often tarnished because of the polite "British reserve” which means that customers are seldom critical direct to your face even if they have an issue.

However there is another way – Mystery Shopping.

A Mystery Shopping Programme allows you to measure your operating standards in an objective way and which provides real in-depth insight as to how your business is really performing with its customers.
AMTI Services Limited is an experienced Mystery Shopping company that can deliver high quality cost effective mystery shopping programmes either as one-off exercises to benchmark a business, or as ongoing programmes measuring performance improvement over time. 
AMTI use a large nationally spread team of trained and experienced mystery customers to visit your establishments and complete a report on a range of performance and service deliverables.

A typical assessment would cover aspects such as 

• General information – This “frames” the assessment showing the time of day, number of customers in at the time, the number of staff on duty etc.

• Exterior – How the venue looks and feels, tidiness of the entrance, car parking etc.

• Bar and dining areas – Presentation, Cleanliness, Promo displays etc.

• Facilities – Toilet cleanliness and availability, baby changing, etc.

• Drinks service – timeliness, accuracy, presentation etc.

• Food service – timeliness, temperature, accuracy, presentation, etc

• General views on staff – personal presentation, friendliness, helpfulness etc.

Questions are usually objective e.g. Did the food arrive within 15 minutes? This is either yes or no and if you have a 15 minute standard then that is important to know. It is much more valuable that a question such as “Did your food arrive in an acceptable time?”
However the assessment will also capture subjective opinions from the mystery customer to give a richer report and assessment.
AMTI has a template scorecard/questionnaire that is ready to use for pubs and restaurants which can be supplemented with bespoke questions very easily.
Results are fed into a balanced scorecard (individual aspects can be given a greater weighting if required) to give each assessment an effectiveness rating.
This rating can be used to monitor performance over time, compare different establishments, assess different staff, and even see differences between different days of the week.
Results are delivered electronically using the internet and are usually available within 24-48 hours of an assessment visit taking place.

The cost of a Mystery Shopping Programme will vary depending on the frequency of visits and detailed requirements of the brief.  However a programme assessing a single establishment once a month for a year would cost around £55 per visit plus a spending allowance for the mystery customer to cover food and drink purchases.  This allowance varies depending on the type of establishment being assessed and the number of guest required in the party.
Mystery Shopping can be a very effective technique in ensuring that your operation remains efficient as possible and is delivering the standards of service you expect to your customers.

For more details about the services AMTI can provide go to www.amtiservices.com

If you want to clarify any aspects of a possible programme or discuss your requirements in more detail please contact Martin Reay at AMTI who will be delighted to talk to you. 

He can be contacted on 07884 117562 or via email at martin.reay@amtiservices.com

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