How Your Hotel Could Benefit From a Mystery Shopper

The beauty of the “mystery shopper” service is that it allows you to see your business as your customers see it. The more heavily involved in the running and overseeing of your company you become, the easier it is to develop a detached view of your company. Many people associate mystery shopping with the retail industry- which of course it is ideal for- but it can also be tailored to suit a number of other sectors such as banks, restaurants and hotels.

Hotels in particular rely on customer service. After all, the luxury of staying somewhere else for a night or two is to experience a level of pampering and relaxation you wouldn’t get at home. Hotels depend on recommendations, and friendly staff, great communication and an excellent service are the ingredients most likely to make this happen.

However, you can’t oversee all areas of your hotel all the time, so how do you ensure this happens? One way to maintain such high levels of customer service is through using our mystery shopper service. Through this we can help you identify weaknesses in your customer care, whether this be at reception as guests arrive, during room service or even in the hotel restaurant. There are multiple opportunities for customer and staff exchanges in the hotel experience and it is important to make sure all are as effective and pleasant as possible. People are unlikely to remember one positive conversation from their whole stay yet one single bad exchange is likely to stick in their memory.

Through the findings we present to you, you can take action that is highly focused on results. You may choose to implement training that is concentrated around these specific areas.

As well as pointing out areas for improvement, we’ll also let you know what worked well, so you and your staff can continue to excel in this area. This in itself can actually provide a great motivation for staff. Recognition for a job well done is enough to spur people on to give that extra level of service. Many companies also choose to use the results of their mystery shopping programme as the basis for a reward scheme.

Our mystery shopping service also offers other types of reporting such as video, internet and telephone. Telephone reporting in particular could be particularly useful for those in the hotel industry as this is often the first point of contact for new customers. As such it is necessary to make the right impression, whether someone is calling up to book or to make an enquiry.

As well as hotels, why not use our mystery shopper service for B&Bs or other guest houses? If anything it is even more important for smaller establishments to provide the right customer service as these smaller businesses tend to rely on returning custom. However large or small your business we are sure to be able to offer you ways to build on your success.