" />There is a wonderful – and almost certainly apocryphal – story about the Queen that suggested she thought that all buildings smelt of fresh paint. The theory went that anywhere HRH was planning to go was given a brush-up, spring clean and a lick of paint. Effectively, her Majesty never saw places for real. The same can occur in venues when senior management are visiting. Managers stack the rotas with staff more likely to carry out the defined steps of service, and the preceding days are spent smartening up the site. This gives an unrealistic impression of the quality of the operation and can create a confusing disconnect between financial performance which suggests poor standards, yet personal feedback that says things look a lot better. One way to genuinely discover how well a site is performing is to get someone to go undercover with a mystery visit.
What is a Mystery Visit
A mystery visit is a powerful tool businesses can use to assess their operations and customer service, offering insights that aren’t always available to the company’s internal team. There are two main ways to conduct a mystery visit.
The first type is the classic mystery customer, where a group of unannounced members of the public visits a venue and evaluates the business against a set of criteria. These criteria might cover everything from the building’s exterior maintenance to whether the bartenders have carried out the correct upsells. Each aspect is rated, and more critical points like whether ID is checked at the bar may be weighted more heavily than others. After the visit, the group fills out a report based on their findings, providing a detailed review of the venue. This type of mystery visit is unplanned and gives a good set of feedback from a true customer perspective – however, it doesn’t explain why standards might not have been correct.
The second type is a mystery customer visit undertaken by professionals from the relevant sector industries who bring a more in-depth understanding of how things should be done, which means they can often identify and explain why certain issues occurred. For example, rather than just saying “the food took too long,” they might say “the kitchen was understaffed, and the system used for taking orders is inefficient.” These professionals offer both insight and actionable advice on how to fix the problems they identify.
There’s also another variation, which is a planned professional visit. This typically happens in places like kitchens where a chef might come in and work with the team for a day, or an experienced duty manager working alongside the rota’d team for the shift, and either way providing structured feedback on how they can improve their processes.
How Do You Evaluate a Venue?
Mystery visits assess a variety of factors depending on the business type. These can include things like:
Building Maintenance: Is the exterior and interior well-maintained and visually appealing?
Service Quality: This might involve checking whether staff take names at reception or upsell effectively, especially in places like bowling alleys or entertainment venues.
Food and Drink: Are they served correctly, as expected, and to a high standard? For example, a glass of Diet Coke might be evaluated on whether it has sufficient ice and a wedge of lime.
Manager Visibility: Is there an identifiable duty manager on shift to ensure smooth operations and assist staff when needed?
Value for Money: Was the overall experience worth the cost? Was the service, product or experience seen as good value?
These points are then scored, with more critical aspects like customer service or safety being weighted more heavily.
How to Conduct a Mystery Visit
There are a couple of different ways to approach a mystery visit, depending on whether you’re the customer or the business owner. If you’re a customer, conducting a mystery visit is straightforward: you simply book a visit, experience the service as any other guest would and take notes on your phone. Afterward, you can reflect on the experience and assess it based on a template of criteria like service quality and value for money.
For a business, while you can carry out a mystery visit internally, this often leads to biased results as your internal team may overlook or fail to identify their own shortcomings. Using an external service is a much more reliable way to get unbiased feedback. These external mystery customers can spot things that those working in the business daily might miss.
How Do You Use the Findings?
The report from a mystery visit is then submitted to the senior management team, usually in a feedback session detailing the results and prioritised action points. The company who carried this out can then assist with creating an action plan to rectify problems. For example, if the report reveals that no ice was provided in drinks, while the obvious action point might be “ensure ice is included in every drink”, this is effectively meaningless. This feedback in a mystery customer report should be a trigger to working out why no ice was provided – is the staff training correctly outlined (and is there time set aside to refresh it regularly), is the ice machine working, does the machine create a sufficient volume of ice for the trading levels, or even something else. Too many times mystery customer visits simply generate a feeling of division between senior management and staff – instead they should be used to investigate the real causes of failings in an unbiased manner, before putting them right for the future.
Maximising the Value of Mystery Visits
To get the most out of a mystery visit, it’s essential to follow through with the findings. Rather than just receiving the report, businesses should sit down with their team and discuss why certain issues were noted. For example, if the report highlights slow service, you might investigate whether it’s due to understaffing, disorganisation, or inefficient systems.
The real value in mystery visits comes from the ability to identify and fix issues at their root cause. If a report mentions poor customer service, it could be due to inadequate training, low morale, or poor staff management. Working through these issues with your team ensures that they’re addressed comprehensively.
It’s also important to conduct regular mystery visits. The first visit may highlight obvious problems like poor cleanliness or slow service, but once those are addressed, you can focus on more subtle issues, such as improving upselling techniques or enhancing the customer experience. By repeating the process regularly, businesses can make ongoing improvements and track their progress over time. It’s beneficial to not only make the necessary changes but also to continually monitor whether the changes have had the desired effect.
Is there a particularly useful time to do it?
If you’re doing a mystery visit for the first time and you don’t know what the problems are, it can be helpful to conduct a visit when it’s at its most busy. This way you should be able to identify where the systems and processes are failing due to the higher footfall, at the time when it’s critical they work properly to fully maximise trading levels.
Mystery visits can also be helpful to unpick why a particular problem is occurring. For example, if your specific issue is stock management related then you might want a mystery customer to just sit at the bar and watch how people are being served. They will then see whether product is being wasted, served improperly or simply given away to the friends of the staff member on shift…. If that’s the case, you’d want to do a mystery visit on a variety of different shifts to see how and when these issues are occurring.
How to Get the Most Value from Mystery Visits
The most effective businesses don’t just stop at receiving a report. They take the findings seriously, work with their team to understand why certain issues are happening and actively make improvements. This could involve training staff, updating systems, or investing in better equipment. We can look at this like a series of levels progressing towards an ideal top tier:
Level 1: No mystery visits are done—everything is left to chance where the business thinks its staff are following procedures
Level 2: A mystery visit is conducted and a report is provided, but there’s little follow-up action taken.
Level 3: Regular mystery visits are conducted and action points are implemented based on feedback.
Level 4: Mystery visits are followed by in-depth discussions with the team to understand the root cause of issues, followed by action plans being put in place to resolve them. The business works with a consultants or experts to continue improving over time.
Most businesses fall somewhere between levels 2 and 3, but the most successful ones reach level 4, where there’s a commitment to ongoing improvement based on consistent feedback. By repeating mystery visits regularly, businesses can ensure they’re always working to improve and stay ahead of customer expectations. This helps keep the customer experience fresh, and ensures that small, unnoticed problems don’t snowball into bigger issues.
If your business could benefit from some fresh perspective, get in touch and find out more about our mystery customer service.
