Westin Hotel general manager John Jarvis. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

At least once in their lives, everyone has gone into an establishment and been appalled by the lack of service or filthiness of the bathroom and thought, "If management knew about this, they would not be happy." Many customers don't bother to inform management but make a mental note not to visit again.

The reality is management can't watch all their employees all the time. Customer surveys help, but many do not have the time to fill out the feedback forms and even if they do, they might not know that they were supposed to be asked if they found everything they were looking for.

That's where mystery shoppers come in.

Mystery shoppers appear like everyday customers, but they are trained on what to look for at each establishment they are hired to review. The shoppers then write detailed reports so management can see if their employees are living up to their standards.

Although employees might think that this program is intrusive and management just doesn't trust them, it can often be management that is the cause of a low score, according to experts. Perhaps management hasn't trained their employees properly or hasn't given them enough time to do all their tasks.

As the general manager for the Westin Hotel in Ottawa, John Jarvis has to make sure that his hotel and its 425 staff members achieve the high standards that customers associate with the Westin name.

He spoke with OBJ about the proper way to use mystery shoppers so that employees aren't anxious and customers are happy.

OBJ: Does the Westin Hotel use mystery shoppers?

JARVIS: Yes, it's something that our parent company Starwood Hotels and Resorts uses. We use special guest shoppers who come in and evaluate our services to see if we are performing up to the brand's expectations as well as our own expectations. They evaluate everything from if we have enough towels in the room to if we follow the company standards in service and policies. We look at follow-up after the evaluation in particular. There are a lot of issues that come up in the shopping procedure.

OBJ: Are employees made aware of what they are going to be evaluated on?

JARVIS: In our company, we have a very extensive list that pertains to what we call "brand standards." Brand standards relate to physical standards, service standards and everything in between. There are over 2,000 standards that we have to meet. So, each department has a list of their standards and they are made aware that through the course of the year they are going to be evaluated multiple times. They never know who is doing the evaluation or when, but the intent is that we don't prepare for just one shopper who is coming in. We want to serve all of our customers in the same sort of way, and that's really what this addresses.

OBJ: What's the difference between using a mystery shopper versus a customer satisfaction survey?

JARVIS: The customer satisfaction survey is a great tool for us. It's like a report card from our customers and we highly value those. We seek feedback from our customers all the time because we have the opportunity to communicate with those who complete it. It's not that we don't value them, we value them highly.

But we also like to bring in a mystery shopper who might be able to cover many more issues in our brand standards. For instance, they can measure standards with our room service and all the different facilities such as the health club and our banquet services. Mystery shoppers will typically look at all of these areas, all at the same time. Whereas an individual customer might just be here on business for one night, he might be attending a conference and never use the restaurant and never use the room service. So the mystery shopper is much more inclusive in using the whole facility, in painting a clearer picture as to what is happening in the facility. And because they are professional, they know what to look for.

OBJ: What do the employees think about the program?

JARVIS: We have a very positive way of dealing with it. We always tell the associates that the information we gather from these evaluations is not to be used in a manner that is going to put their jobs in jeopardy. That's not why we do mystery shopping. We're not there to police what our associates are doing and in that type of manner. What we're there to do is hopefully reinforce what we should be doing as a leadership team and as a company in terms of serving our customers. And when we don't get that job done, we want to identify where it is that we can – and have to – improve.

Maybe it was, for instance, cleaning the bathroom. I remember on several occasions that mystery shoppers noted that our bathrooms were not as clean as they should have been. Well then, that might identify to us that we need to go back with our room attendants and work on a better training program in the bathrooms.

OBJ: So the mystery shoppers are for management too?

JARVIS: Exactly. We really use mystery shoppers as a management tool. We have 35 different managers who manage different departments in this property. And they need to get feedback as to what is happening in their areas. They can't be following all of their associates because we have 425 employees here. We can't necessarily follow all of them around just to see what we're doing well and not doing well. This is a tool to help us figure out things like where we need to focus training time and efforts on improving our customer service. n

THE EXPERTS SAY

The benefits of hiring a mystery shopper are that you can measure staff performance anonymously by putting yourself in the customer's shoes and say whether or not the experience is adhering to the standard of what the company has set out to achieve. It is different from a customer satisfaction survey in that it will tell you specifically if something is said or not said, done or not done by staff.

The mystery shopper knows before going in what is supposed to be done. Companies spend a lot of money finding out what products are giving them the margins they want and then they say, "this is what we want you to promote to the customer." Average shoppers don't have the experience to know whether or not staff is doing these things.

You can train and you can watch, but results are different if the manager is standing there watching. That doesn't always happen if the manager is away.

For example, sometimes a customer survey will show a high level of satisfaction, but they will score low with mystery shoppers. The customer might be very happy with the service, but they weren't offered an up-sell or something that was supposed to be part of the experience. So the company isn't satisfied. So then we analyze that gap and see what they can do to bring the level to what the company finds satisfactory.

Usually mystery shopping efforts are requested when they already expect a (certain) level of behaviour. When staff has a low rating that can usually come back to poor communication or poor training, so it can escalate up to management.

Tracey Conners, vice-president, CRG Mystery Shopping

We don't tell companies how to operate, we just tell them if what they want is being done. Our clients range from doctor's offices, law offices, restaurants, hotels and – it's a hard job but someone's got to do it – I've even gone to Club Med.

People sometimes have the misconception that mystery shopping will solve their problems. You have to have the right culture in the workplace and hire the right people. You can train someone to put salt on the fries but you can't train someone to smile.

I don't think that mystery shopping should take the place of customer satisfaction surveys or that customer surveys should take the place of mystery shopping. If you want it done right, you have to do both because a customer might not have the same standards as the company.

Mystery shopping is all about detail and brand standards. Those standards that we're measuring are part of the brand. For example, years ago, one of my first jobs was working at McDonalds. Back then, no matter where you went in the world, you could always rely on the food to be hot and fresh, the service to be fast and the bathrooms to be clean. In their quest for profitability those standards have fallen in recent years. There are still customer satisfaction surveys, but those don't ensure that the brand is remaining strong.

In the U.S., there is more of a fear that mystery shopping is all about "big brother" spying on employees and managers waiting in the wings with a stick ready to whack their employees for messing up. Here in Canada, I find it tends to be more about coaching and developing skills for employees and finding problem areas.

David Lipton, president, Sensors Quality Management Inc.