Exceeding Expectations

Let’s dive back into Shep Hyken’s 2020 special report, continuing where we left off from last week. The next topic concerns consumer expectations, which Hyken measured by asking respondents “to rank industries based on what level of customer service they expect to receive”—not their actual experiences, just what they anticipated.…
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The Power of Convenience on the Customer Experience

Returning to Shep Hyken’s 2020 special report that we discussed a couple weeks back, let’s turn our attention to the price are willing to pay for their customer experience. We can surmise that some people are indeed willing to pay more for higher quality, naturally. Otherwise, luxury brands wouldn’t exist,…
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The Mystery Shopping Report Card

The Brandt Group offers a variety of detailed reporting options for our clients to review and interpret the mystery shopping data we collect. The reports empower them to identify big-picture trends or focus in on the tiniest of details. And they’re all scalable, offering a view of the entire company,…
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Are You Losing Customers to Bad Customer Service?

The customer experience is the most crucial aspect of your business, beating out even your products and service offerings in the hierarchy of whether customers choose to shop with you or with a competitor. This was confirmed again by Shep Hyken, who recently put out a “special report on customer…
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Selling in the Age of COVID-19

Salespeople didn’t know how easy we had it before March 2020. In those days, we mainly had to focus on asking open-ended questions, explaining how our products and services could meet the customers’ needs, overcoming their objections, and closing the sale. Throw in some follow-ups and referral requests, and you…
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Empower Employees to Feel Safe

We’ve long stressed the importance of empowering employees to be the best representatives of your company as possible. Historically, this has meant allowing them to make decisions on the frontline for the sake of efficiency and timeliness—huge boons for your customer experience, as well as your employees’ own job satisfaction.…
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Pivoting to Take-Out and Delivery

Some states are reopening, others are reclosing, and still others are stuck someplace in between. Restauranteurs have it especially tough during this global pandemic because their businesses need volume in order to make up for already thin margins. Most restaurant managers even have a magic number of tables in their…
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Is Now Really a Good Time to Mystery Shop?

Unless you’ve just returned from a sabbatical in the Alaskan interior, you’ve probably noticed that these are unusually intense times we’re living in: the headline of every newspaper and the highlight of every cable news segment is singularly focused on just how perilous it is to even go outside. Hyperbole…
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What’s the Difference Between a Mystery Shop and a Feedback Survey?

When we’re first approached by prospective new clients, we often hear that they’ve already tried conducting feedback surveys in the hopes of understanding their customers’ viewpoint. This is actually great since it demonstrates the natural interest we should show for the quality of the customer experience, especially as we hope…
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