Gastronomy & Hospitality - Mystery Guesting
DELIGHTING GUESTS WITH A PERFECT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
concertare has been supporting customers in the hotel and restaurant industry for over 20 years with hotel tests, restaurant tests and special projects geared towards the hotel and restaurant sectors. In these industries, customer contact employees are a decisive factor for customer satisfaction, likelihood of revisiting, and willingness to recommend.
concertare supports hotels, restaurants and other gastronomic concepts with specially designed mystery guest checks and offers programs that enable your employees not only to satisfy your guests, but to inspire them.
PROJECTS AND SERVICES FOR HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS
The most important project goals and services for hotels and restaurants are:
Mystery Guesting or Mystery Guest Checks: Our hotel testers and test customers check the service quality and orientation of the employees and service staff with special mystery shopping on site and show potential for improvement.
Customer surveys: In which, for example, customer satisfaction, customer expectations of the stay, the likelihood of return, or the willingness to recommend are determined.
Conducting audits: To check compliance with internal company standards, especially in the areas of service, marketing, hygiene, compliance, and safety, checking legal requirements such as hygiene standards, or conducting youth protection tests.
Determination of training needs for service personnel: To increase customer satisfaction through greater service orientation, customer orientation programs, and verification of training success.
Test calls (mystery calls): at the reception and in the sales department as well as test inquiries by means of mystery mails / test emails and process analysis of the follow-up.
Usability checks: to test the user-friendliness of the website and the reservation / booking process.
CLIENTS AND PROJECTS (EXTRACT)
METHODS FOR INCREASING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION IN GASTRONOMY AND HOTELS
As part of our mystery guesting projects, as well as our customer surveys for hotel chains, hotels, and restaurants, we have used various survey instruments to collect data on customer contact quality.
The most important survey methods used include:
Surveys using mystery shopping methods: In particular mystery guest checks, service tests, test visits, test calls, and test emails, as well as quality analyses of recorded service conversations.
Key figure analyses: On customer satisfaction (Customer Satisfaction Index), on the likelihood of repeat visits, on customer loyalty, and on willingness to recommend (NPS), customer surveys on topics such as price perception, service quality, or customer orientation.
Employee surveys: To determine employee expectations, employee satisfaction, and employee loyalty.
Process analyses: Along the customer journey on selection, information, and comparison behavior, as well as optimization of complaints management and telephone customer service.
Social media audit: Systematic analysis and evaluation of guest reviews posted online via various platforms.
MYSTERY GUESTING IN HOTELS AND RESTAURANTS
Mystery shopping procedures are used to check and develop all customer contact channels, in particular through hotel tests, test overnight stays and test stays, observations, test calls / mystery calls, test emails / test inquiries, and audits.
What makes the use of mystery research procedures special is their multiple benefits: These instruments are often used not only for measurement, but also specifically for individual employee development of service personnel or visitor management.
With this help, individual service staff can reflect on their consulting behavior from the customer's point of view and thus continuously improve their service orientation and consulting quality. Our test customers (mystery guests), who are specially trained for hotels and gastronomy, evaluate all elements relevant to customer contact quality on the basis of a questionnaire that we have previously agreed with you as the customer.
Direct feedback is also possible, in which our test guests give you and your employees an objective assessment of the service quality experienced.
Another central analysis aspect is the recording of the holistic customer experience in all steps of the customer journey. This can include the selection, information, and online search behavior for offers and prices as well as the employee contact during the reservation process. Employee-related aspects such as the greeting, quality of advice, behavior, etc. are examined. The guest evaluation following the stay, systematically and professionally evaluated, also provides important information for improving customer satisfaction.
CUSTOMER AND EMPLOYEE SURVEYS IN THE HOTELS AND GASTRONOMY
As a classic instrument for measuring customer satisfaction, willingness to recommend and likelihood of revisiting, we have been using customer surveys that have been tried and tested and adapted to your situation for years.
If you already use customer satisfaction surveys in your hotel or gastronomic business, we can advise you on how to optimize them and how to make the best use of the results, based on our extensive knowledge of the industry. Our goal is to translate evaluated data from customer feedback as directly as possible into proposed measures and training for service staff.
Employee surveys also pursue the goal of deriving concrete measures from the information collected on employee satisfaction. These are usually implementation programs for greater customer centricity, an increase in service orientation, and long-term employee retention and development.
TURNING GUESTS INTO REGULARS THROUGH EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE
The project objectives for the implementation of mystery guest checks in hotels, restaurants and pubs can be different. Basically, three orientations can be distinguished, which can be served either individually or in combination with each other:
Projects for the development of service employees: regarding a better customer orientation, more service quality as well as thus an increase of the customer satisfaction and finally the re-visit probability. The initiator of such projects is usually the sales department.
Projects to develop training needs and monitor training success: These projects focus on reviewing and adapting training concepts in service, as well as improving training content and coaching measures. The clients of such training projects are usually the training or personnel development departments.
Projects that check compliance with standards: The aim of these projects is to use audits and mystery research methods to check the extent to which company-wide standards or legislative requirements, e.g. hygiene standards, youth protection or data protection, are being complied with by all the employees concerned. Quality assurance measures such as these are usually initiated by the company's quality management.
BENCHMARK DATA FOR HOSPITALITY BUSINESS
Benchmark studies are a proven means of comparing one's own employees and service staff from different departments with each other and with competitors. Benchmark studies usually involve a large number of surveys and are correspondingly costly.
Since 2005, concertare has been regularly conducting corresponding benchmark tests across all relevant areas in the German hotel and catering market, in which the performance and customer orientation of market participants are measured in a comparative manner. The data collected by concertare is thus available to all providers in order to be able to directly compare themselves with other market participants.
FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT MYSTERY GUEST CHECKS
Practical examples, current studies and trends on the topics of mystery guesting, customer loyalty and service orientation in the hotel and restaurant sector can also be found in our Infocenter and in our concertare blog.
If you would like to know more about services in the hospitality sector, please contact us!