If you’re thinking about running some mystery dining assessments but you’re not sure what that looks like. Read on!

Mystery dining assessments run in a similar way to mystery shopper, but they are usually run by hospitality specialists like Silent Customer. 

A brief is created for the mystery diners so they know what they must look out for and feedback on, and a detailed survey, with up to 100 questions, is created to reflect that.

A mystery diner applies for the assessment and is selected on their suitability. After they covertly visit the location, they complete the survey and submit it to the quality controllers for checking and editing.  The survey is then emailed to the client and stored on the software so that cumulative data and be analysed across different areas of the business. The detailed feedback can include imagery, email correspondence and call recordings. It is often used for bonus related KPI’s .

Mystery dining assessments are an investment since they take time to set up and are labour intensive to run diligently so you do need to find the right mystery shopping company for you! 

If you only want to know the basics, through anecdotal feedback, and your budget is low, you might want to opt for a customer online review management software. These platforms pull reviews across and measure customer sentiment. Silent Customer has a fabulous platform that does this. While we recommend that you use both mystery dining assessments and online feedback aggregation and management, since the output is different, this feedback scraping is the bare minimum that any hospitality company should be using.     

If you are looking for deeper insight and are ready to action change within your business, then choose a mystery shopping company that understands your industry so that you can go beyond ticking the customer journey touchpoint boxes. Ask if their teams, who are going to design your surveys have the emotional intelligence, life experience and empathy to understand human behaviour and the challenges of the hospitably industry. Can they write questions that extract what customers felt about their experience? And, can they edit that into meaningful insight that the teams on the ground will accept positively?   

Silent Customer has been running mystery dining assessments with emotional intelligence for over 16 years. Call us to find out more.