Hotel mystery auditsHotels make a huge investment to create traffic and drive it to the door and hotels spend a fortune on their image and on their brand. If these two significant investments are not aligned you don’t have a fighting chance.
Mystery shopping measures whether the traffic you drive in the door is in alignment with the guest expectation of quality with whatever it is that hotel is promising. And that all comes down to an assessment of a property’s training. The ability of a mystery shopper to dictate a scenario and behave, based on what an employee might say or do, is another structured form of “Management by Walking Around” (MBWA) that helps ensure the customer bias for quality is met.
For example, as a guest approaches the desk: how long does it take for them to be acknowledged and welcomed? Are they addressed by name once introduced? How long does it take housekeeping to respond to an item request? Room service for instance, is tested in the early/late hours. How far and tactfully does your staff safe-guard guest privacy and confidentiality? How does the cashier react when the guest finds something to query on the bill when checking out………..the list is infinite, well almost!
The experienced mystery shopper or guest – your undercover CEO if you will, can take different actions based on their observations and knowing what the hotel expects from each employee. The fundamental approach is to focus and measure the standards you may have established, (be it by way of a quality assurance or standards of operations program, or similar), through an audit that ‘maps’ the entire journey traversed by your guest when staying in your hotel.
The results of the audit used purposefully as a measuring tool may uncover underlying issues:
Issues that will allow you, as the General Manager, to address changes in the environment, personnel and training programs – all aimed towards supporting the hotel’s goal of consistent quality service. Through mystery audits you gain access to information that allows staff to be aware of the strong / weak points, and involve them with continuous improvement objectives related to customer satisfaction.
Mystery shopping pinpoints the finer nuances that create an emotional connection between the hotel and its guests. The devil really is in the details, and as such, that’s where the hotel needs to focus the attention. Mystery guest programmes allow hotel management teams to see when training works perfectly and when there are consistent gaps in training, and, most importantly, improve customer service as they go.
A main characteristic of the mystery guest audit is that the audit is unexpected, and, the shoppers are not recognizable among the general guest count. As the saying goes, "what is never observed...never improves".
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