When your mystery shopping clients start to think about doing customer satisfaction surveys, they’re going to need your help. Many of them will want to simply take their mystery shopping questions, reformat them, and call the result a “customer satisfaction survey”. Unless you like to watch your clients shoot themselves in the foot, you need to steer them away from this, explain the differences between mystery shopping and customer satisfaction surveys, and teach them best practices in designing and implementing a customer satisfaction survey.
Keep it short
You can’t create a lengthy survey and expect people to answer it. Keep it short, tell people up front how long it should take to complete, and make that number accurate. The longer your survey is, the more likely your only respondents will be those who are angry enough to wade through your survey for the chance to go off on you in the “Other comments?” section.
Get opinions, not facts
A customer satisfaction survey is not the place to check for objective, quantitative measurements. Sure, you can ask your customers how long it took them to be served or whether the associate offered to supersize their order…but why bother, when they’ll most likely be guessing? You can’t count on their answers being accurate – that’s what mystery shoppers are for. In a customer satisfaction survey, you’re looking for the subjective aspects of the customer experience. So, for example, a mystery shopping survey would contain quantifiable questions about a restaurant item (“Please verify that your sandwich contained the following items: lettuce, tomato, cheese, dressing”, for example), but a customer satisfaction survey would ask, “Please rate the quality of your sandwich”, and would give a simple scale (1-5) for responses.
Ask about what you care about.
Remember, you’re not going to get to ask many questions, so make them count! Your survey questions must reflect what you’re trying to measure. When considering whether to include a question on a survey, ask yourself:
- Is this something that we really care about?
What are your client’s core values, as a business? What are the most important parts of their brand identity? Where do they want to be the undisputed leader? If they’re a café, and they want to be seen as a comfortable place where people can sit, drink coffee and eat snacks, and surf the web, they’ll want to know whether there was adequate seating. If their brand identity is about hipness, you might ask about music or décor. Your client is trying to be known for certain things, so ask questions to see if they’re making the right impression.
- How much do customers really want this?
Sooner or later, you’ll encounter a customer who tells your client in great detail about how awesome their business would be, and how they’d be the most devoted customer ever, and how they know there are a gazillion other customers who feel just like them – if your client would just offer this one product or service. “Customer feedback, woohoo!” you’ll shout with glee, and the next thing you know, you’ve created a survey where you ask all Better Burger customers whether they, too, would like the menu to include a free-range wheat-free artisanal 
Tie customer satisfaction to mystery shopping
Just because a customer satisfaction survey gives subjective responses, doesn’t mean you can’t derive hard information from it. The trick is to match the questions on the customer satisfaction survey with corporate standards that can be measured by mystery shopping. For example:
Customer Satisfaction Survey
Mystery Shopping Survey
“Please rate the promptness of the service (1-5)”
“Record the time:
- Before you were greeted
- Before you were seated
- Before your drink order was taken
- Before your meal order was taken”
“Please rate the friendliness of your server (1-5)”
“Did the server greet you with ‘Good afternoon/evening, welcome to Better Burger’?”
“Did the server thank you for your order?”
“Did the server use the phrase, ‘Thank you for eating at Better Burger’?”
If customers have a poor subjective impression of your client’s service, you’d expect to see poor scores on the related mystery shop questions – but what if you don’t? Maybe your client’s corporate standards need adjusting. Maybe their servers are doing exactly what they’re supposed to – and customers find it incredibly annoying (for example, aggressive upselling).
On the other hand, you might find that your client cares much more about something than their customers do. Maybe your client has a goal to greet and seat all customers within three minutes, and their mystery shop data shows that they’re missing that consistently. But customer satisfaction survey customers are satisfied with the wait times, and when you check other data such as sales figures, your client seems to be doing fine.
What about incentivized surveys?
An incentivized survey can overcome some of the limitations of what you can do with a customer satisfaction survey – but don’t push it. The incentive has to be worthwhile (which doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to have a high dollar value) and easy to claim. For example, compare the following incentives:
- A 5% off coupon offered by a retailer
- A $2 off coupon for a sandwich purchase of $5 or more at a popular sandwich chain
- Free tickets to a concert
- A chance to win an iPad
The 5% coupon could have a substantial dollar value if applied to a large purchase, but itseems like a low number – as an incentive, it might make your client’s customers feel more patronized than rewarded. The $2 off coupon represents a much larger percentage of the projected purchase, and is perceived as more generous and more desirable.
Besides “big enough”, there’s also “the right stuff”. An incentive isn’t an incentive if it’s not something that your potential survey respondents want. The sandwich incentive, if done as a register-receipt survey, targets the customers who are already buying your sandwiches, and are more likely to buy them again (and to appreciate a substantial discount). Free tickets to a concert might be a good incentive for a survey of guests attending a performance of the same type of music at the same venue – but as an incentive for a web survey that solicits responses from a wide geographic area, not so much.
Your incentive also has to be easy to claim. Paper coupons work, but consider coupon codes that are redeemable for online purchases, or that can be scanned using a smartphone app and then redeemed at a retail location.
Remember, you’re in the opinion business
Most of the opinions we’re exposed to are nothing but hot air. Customer satisfaction responses are pure opinion – unprofessional, unscientific, and still very valuable. Intelligently combined with mystery shopping results, they offer a much more complete view of how your client’s product or service is being received by their customer base.
