When we were in the planning phase of this year’s study with CSP, we paused to explore what we should measure.
For a decade, we conducted a customer-service-style mystery shop, testing for items such as greetings and suggestive selling. We measured important fundamentals such as cleanliness and product availability (out of stocks), but not to any level of detail. Last year, we began approaching each of the participating chains for permission to shop in their stores.
We talk about the speed of change in the world of technology. A cellphone from 2010 or a first-generation tablet won’t do you much good in 2015. We have seen a similar acceleration in customer expectations. And the question we began asking ourselves is: How are c-stores performing in the areas in which customers are most likely to judge you?
Overt vs. Covert
Imagine you receive feedback from customers that they are unhappy with the quality of your coffee at a particular location. Does it mean that location is not adhering to standards, or do the customers in that area not like your particular formula? As part of your investigation, you need to ascertain whether to focus on training or to consider a different coffee blend. At the same time, if you are measuring excellent store execution and not listening to customers, you may never figure out why sales are not growing.
The simple reality is, there are things you can measure overtly that you cannot measure covertly, and the reverse is also true. There’s still a third leg that is missing to ensure balance and stability: a customer-experience component that solicits feedback from your patrons.
Covert and overt mystery shop/audit activities are great at telling you whether your locations are living up to your internal standards, while customer feedback lets you know if customers agree with your standards.
What does this mean for the 2015 study? Because we did not have access to the information required for all three legs of the stool, we continued our movement toward the overt program that we started in 2014 because we felt it provided more robust information in line with where the industry is going. So we again asked chains for permission to shop in their stores. We would choose the stores and times, but our mystery shoppers would have a form granting them the right to measure freshness across the entire foodservice offering.
The truth is, if you’re going to compete with QSRs and casual dining for share of stomach, you have to be better at more areas than just those traditionally necessary to sell fuel and smokes. We checked to make sure the staff was well-groomed and that the pump islands and front counter were clean, but we also went deeper.
For example:
- Was the temperature in the dairy and sandwich coolers within range?
- Did the sandwiches look fresh and were they presented attractively?
- Were the sandwiches within their expiration date?
- Was the ceiling, including vents, clean?
- Was the fountain area clean, stocked and functional?
- Did the location have a working thermometer for testing the coffee temperature?
In appreciation, we offered each chain all of the store-level information. We hope these fine operators will combine our research with in-depth customer surveys and assess whether their procedures and offerings meet—if not exceed—their customers’ expectations.
Embrace Technology
This is where I see great news for the convenience channel. Multiple data streams from diverse sources can now be brought together easily to provide common dashboards and analytics.
In fact, there are ways to structure the storage of data to allow for diverse programs, even from different vendors, to merge and provide meaningful, automated information. The cost of providing data aggregation, storage, reporting and related services has dropped dramatically for the vendors who provide it.
If you are not on a path that lets you see things such as the correlation between the execution of suggestive selling and transaction size by location, or gives you the ability to know which organizational standards need to be changed and which locations need to be retrained, speak to your vendors about getting on this path.
With the latest technology, not only can you get what you need, but you also can do it for far less cost than ever before. Don’t settle!
NEXT: Complete Mystery Shop Retailer Report Cards
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