Everyone’s heard the pop psychology concept that people are either left-brained or 
In contrast, “right-brained” customer satisfaction surveys are all about opinion – and often, the opinion is a very strong one. A customer satisfaction survey reflects the subjective views of actual customers about their own experience. These are real shoppers telling you what they really feel.
Sometimes, mystery shopping clients get stuck on the right-brained customer satisfaction stuff – the emotional experience of the customer – and start to wonder why they need mystery shopping at all. If the goal is happier customers, why wouldn’t you just go to the source? The thing is, customer satisfaction surveys don’t tell your client the whole story. They see the customer’s response to what’s happening now – but they don’t see what they need to do to improve the customer experience. Just as with the left side and right side of your brain, when mystery shopping and customer satisfaction work together, the resulting business intelligence is far more than what either one could do on its own.
Corporate standards versus customer experience (or, your clean counter equals my longer wait)
Picture this: your client – a well-known chain of coffeehouses – has a corporate standard for cleanliness for all customer areas of the cafe. Now, if you’ve ever worked at a café, you know that the condiment station is a mess magnet. Some days, customers trash the condiment area like it’s their job – and then other customers complain about the spills, the mess, and the fact that you ran out of Equal. Your clients know this, because the customers told them in their customer satisfaction survey – people get a serious case of cranky pants over that messy and Equal-deficient condiment station.
So your client sets a corporate standard that the condiment station will be checked, cleaned and restocked at least once every five minutes. They update your corporate training, send notices to all locations, and they have mystery shoppers verify that the standard is kept. Brilliant! They’re on your way to a cleaner condiment station, and more satisfied customers…right?
If only. They do another customer satisfaction survey, and they find that now customers are annoyed by the long wait in line. Dig a little deeper, and they find comments like, “Why do you have someone always straightening the coffee stirrers while the line is out the door?” “How come you’ve only got two people to take orders and make drinks at the busiest time of the day?” See what happens when you try to do something nice for people?
Give the people what they want – maybe?
At this point, your client could charge off in the direction that their most recent customer satisfaction survey would seem to point, and forget about the condiment station standard. But think about who’s responding to the survey, and why. Surveys are mostly filled out by customers who are:
- really happy (less common)
- really unhappy (more common), or
- incentivized to answer the survey.
For non-incentivized customers, the survey serves as a complaint/compliment form – and the complaints, especially, are subjective and not factual. A complaining customer may say, “It took me forever to get my latte!” but how can your client improve if they don’t know what “forever” is?
The solution is to combine customer satisfaction survey results with mystery shopping for better business intelligence. Mystery shopping can tell your client how their locations are meeting corporate standards. Customer satisfaction surveys can tell your client where customers perceive their experience as particularly painful or pleasant. By comparing the customer comments that stand out with those same locations’ performance on objectively measured standards, your client can get a sense for whether their corporate standards are resulting in an improved customer experience. Ideally, they’d see more favorable customer comments tracking with high mystery shop scores, but what if they don’t? Then it’s time for you to give them some guidance in figuring out what the results mean:
- Improved customer satisfaction responses are usually a good sign – but if you’re not also seeing an improvement in mystery shopping scores, don’t start celebrating yet. If customer satisfaction ratings went from negative to neutral or slightly positive, but mystery shopping scores remain poor, it could mean that customers have resigned themselves to a lower level of service (or that the ones who really care have gone elsewhere). It’s a “meh” rating – your client’s customers don’t really like what they’re getting, they’ve just lowered their expectations. If a competitor comes along who can offer something better, your client’s customers may find that they care after all – and leave.
- Negative responses don’t necessarily mean that your client is doing something wrong. As in the café condiment station example, it can mean that a good idea backfired. That doesn’t make it a bad idea, but it probably needs to be adjusted, at least.
- If your client getting raves in a particular area, do they know why? Again, go back to the hard data of the mystery shop, and how it represents the client’s corporate standards and programs. If customers are suddenly loving their experience, can you track it to something that your client did, or is it just a happy accident?
- Neutral responses can tell you a lot, too – particularly about areas that
your client thinks are important, but that their customers might not. Is there a standard that your client cares about a lot, and that they put a lot of resources into maintaining – but that your customers just don’t value? It’s important for your client not to just measure compliance to their most important standards – they also need to look at how much difference this makes in the customer experience.
Ultimately, by comparing corporate standards to customer experience, your clients will gain deeper, more meaningful insights into how they are doing. Just as using our brain in a functional way means using it as an integrated whole, optimizing business requires examining performance through multiple lenses in order to illuminate the bigger picture. Doing so will not only enable your clients to gain a more complete understanding of how they are doing, but it will subsequently enable them to make intelligent, informed decisions as to what steps need to be taken to achieve the kind of service for which they strive.