There is something satisfying about keeping score. When you conduct a mystery shop, survey your customers, or track customer service metrics, the results give you something tangible. Maybe 78% of customers were greeted promptly. Perhaps your satisfaction score rose five points. Or maybe the results went the other way, and your mystery shopping program uncovered a service standard that employees meet only half the time.
Whatever the result, you finally have a way to see how your business is performing. But that’s not enough. You have to know what happens next.
Customer service expert Shep Hyken recently addressed this question in an article about turning customer insights into profit. He highlights a quote from Mariusz Gromada’s Customers First, Value Next: “Insight is a cost. Action is a profit.” Hyken’s point is simple: collecting customer information requires time and money. The return comes when you use what you’ve learned to make your business better.
That’s particularly important when you’re investing in mystery shopping or customer feedback surveys. The report you receive is a scoreboard. And a scoreboard can tell you whether you’re winning, losing, or improving. But numbers alone can’t coach your team.
Measure Something You Can Actually Improve
Good customer research should give you more than a general sense that customers are happy or unhappy.
Consider a restaurant owner who learns from a customer survey that guests don’t feel particularly welcomed when they arrive. That’s useful, but there’s still a question to answer: What’s actually happening at the front door?
Mystery shopping can help fill in the blanks. Perhaps shoppers consistently report that hosts are busy looking down at the seating chart when guests enter. Maybe nobody makes eye contact until the customer approaches the host stand. Perhaps greetings are warm at one location or during a specific shift and almost nonexistent at another.
Customer feedback and mystery shopping can complement each other especially well here. Your customers tell you how the experience felt. A trained mystery shopper can help identify what happened during that experience.
Now you have something a manager can work with.
That’s why The Brandt Group offers both mystery shopping programs and customer feedback surveys. Different tools answer different questions, and together they can give you a much clearer picture of where your customer experience is succeeding and where it needs attention.
Turn the Results into Coaching
Suppose several mystery shops reveal that employees are explaining your loyalty program only 30% of the time. You could put that number in a report, discuss it at the next management meeting, and tell everyone that 30% isn’t good enough.
Then what?
If employees don’t understand when to mention the program, how to explain it naturally, or why it matters to the customer, simply showing them a disappointing score probably won’t produce improvement.
This is where leadership becomes critical. Managers need to know how to take information from mystery shops, surveys, complaints, and other customer feedback and translate it into specific expectations and examples for their teams. They need to coach employees without making every disappointing result feel punitive. They also need to recognize progress when employees begin putting that coaching into practice.
Sometimes a recurring frontline problem points back to management itself. If employees routinely mishandle a common complaint, for example, you may discover that nobody has ever given them a clear service recovery process. You’ve uncovered a training gap.
That distinction matters because it shows your employees aren’t simply being lazy.
Leadership training helps your managers become better equipped to diagnose those gaps, communicate expectations, coach their people, and create the consistency that customers eventually experience on the other side of the counter.
Then Look at the Scoreboard Again
Now comes the part that businesses sometimes overlook. Measure again.
If employees mentioned the loyalty program 30% of the time before coaching, what happens during the next round of mystery shops? Did the number climb to 50%? Seventy percent? Did five locations improve while one stayed exactly where it was?
The same applies to customer feedback. If customers told you that checkout was frustrating, you made changes, and six months later they’re still telling you the same thing, you need to know that.
Hyken warns that companies that deliberately ask customers for feedback and then do nothing with it are wasting both time and money. Customers also notice whether their feedback leads to improvements. If it does, that’s wonderful! If it doesn’t, you’re only discouraging them further.
That’s why customer experience measurement works best as a continuing cycle: Measure. Identify. Train. Measure again.
Over time, your scoreboard becomes far more useful because you’re no longer looking at isolated numbers. You’re looking at progress. You can see which changes worked, which ones didn’t, where employees need additional coaching, and where yesterday’s weakness has become today’s strength.
Don’t Just Keep Score
For more than 30 years, The Brandt Group has helped businesses understand what their customers experience and use that information to improve performance, which is why we maintain an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau.
Our mystery shopping programs give you a real-world look at how your service standards are being carried out. Our customer feedback surveys let you hear directly from the people you’re trying to serve. And our leadership training seminars help your managers turn those findings into better coaching, stronger employees, and more consistent customer experiences.
If you’re ready to do more than collect scores, partner with The Brandt Group. We’ll help you figure out what the numbers are telling you and, more importantly, what to do next.
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