The P&L Report of Mystery Shopping

The Brandt Group offers many detailed reports with which our clients can interpret the mystery shopping data we generate. They can identify big-picture trends or focus on the minutiae, covering your entire company, a regional division, an individual store, a specific department, or even one employee. Each report has its own use, but there’s one that we want to highlight in today’s blog: our Question Summary report.

Our founder, John Brandt, likens this summary to a P&L (Profits and Losses) report because it’s able to show you where your customer service and sales initiatives are working best (a.k.a. your profits), and where the mistakes and missed opportunities are hurting the most (a.k.a. your losses). This report can be set to cover whatever resolution you like, from the company-wide level down to the individual; moreover, it can be narrowed to a specific chunk of time or be broadened to compare the past with the present. This report can show whether the arrow of success is pointed up or down.

How It Works

As you may know, we tailor each question on your mystery shopping survey to your industry and your specific business needs. This also includes weighting, which is to say that the potential value of each question varies depending on how important it is. For example, a restauranteur should want a strong emphasis on the question of whether his server offers up-sells, like appetizers, drinks, or desserts. Knowing how strongly these offers affect the bottom line, maybe even making or breaking profitability, he might want this one question to be worth an outsized amount of points compared to the others, so much so that failing this one question could flip a shop score from great to average (or even to poor) just on its own.

What the Question Summary report allows is for a manager to see how the employees are doing on each individual question across time, not just during the one shop. In the case of the up-sell offer, this would show how often the servers at that location were completing this important task over time to reveal how well your training or your incentives are working.

A Flexible Strategy

These Question Summary reports offer another opportunity: at The Brandt Group, we’re flexible about making changes to your mystery shopping survey as you see fit. The reason this works so well with these summary reports is that they can show you where your business has consistency issues. Say a business has overflowing exterior trashcans, much to the store manager’s surprise After seeing the summary reports that show how often his location is failing this question, he knows he needs to emphasize how it important it is to keep the entryway clean and inviting. In addition to coaching his subordinates directly, he also asks us to double or even triple the value of this one question to make sure that missing this question will result in a painful point deduction. If mystery shopping scores are tied directly to bonuses, this problem will disappear quickly.

Versatility

Detailed reporting combined with the kind of flexibility we offer here at The Brandt Group makes our mystery shopping program highly versatile. Just as your business must evolve to face new challenges, we continue to tailor your mystery shops so you can find the answers to whatever new questions arise. Reports like Question Summaries show you where the strengths and weaknesses are, just like P&L Reports show where money is earned and lost, so you know exactly where your attention should be invested.

These qualities make The Brandt Group a leader in our industry. Contact us today and we’ll develop a mystery shopping program custom fitted to your business needs. More importantly, we’ll keep making whatever modifications as the need arises to keep your business agile.

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