I ate at the Wolseley on Thursday night. My very great friend Meghan Ridsdale booked us in. She knows every eatery in London and is a reliable source of recommendation for anyone’s budget, taste, styling, and expectations.      A fabulous building, incredibly busy, great service, and with a modestly priced ‘something for everyone’s taste’ menu.  Anyway, the building was designed as a car showroom for Wolseley in 1921 and is very ‘Agatha Christie’. It then became

Using online reviews for feedback is important and inexpensive but relying only on this data (because it is cheaper than mystery shopping) will not alert you to everything you need to know.        The nail bar I go to, took on a new trainee six months ago. She was terrible!  And, despite much training from her colleagues, which was painful to watch, she didn’t improve. Luckily for me she wasn’t trusted to do

Why negative feedback hurts: Let’s start with the emotional reaction to why negative feedback hurts. Generally, people associate ‘feedback’ with ‘criticism’. “Criticism is a gift” I hear from people, when I tell them what I do, but the thing is, I know that most of us fear it and certainly no one looks forward to receiving it!   ‘Criticism’ is almost always a complaint about our character or worth or work and it’s a challenge

In short mystery shopping works by delivering feedback to the front lines, covering all learning styles and motivating change. Well, it does when it’s delivered by Silent Customer because it’s our values that underpin the success of our mystery shopping services.         As a child, my mother always told me I had the ‘attention span of a gnat’. My maths teachers said I ‘just needed to apply myself ‘ and my grandfather threatened me with the

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.

Mystery shopping companies are similar in the basic mechanics of how they function. They have a chunky, complex, software platform that matches mystery shoppers by location and appropriateness to the specific assessments. Then it collects a tone of data and enables the clients to drill into it from a myriad of different perspectives.       All mystery shopping software allows the client to benchmark their organisation geographically and by management level. All mystery shopping