You have heard it 100 times. Maybe you read it in a textbook in business school. Maybe your mentor added emphasis to make it a point that stuck with you for the rest of your professional career. As a manager, you simply can’t be everywhere at once. Employing mystery shopping techniques allows managers to expand their reach and collect data and information they would otherwise be unable to acquire and is easily one of the most cost-effective data collection tools available in today’s business climate. But mystery shopping helps your club in myriad other ways outside of data collection and pain-point identification.
Here are four additional ways 59club USA clients use mystery shopping data to better their clubs:
Team Feedback with Specific Examples
You can’t run a business on “he said she said” whether the topic in question is good or bad. No matter what, there will always be a bias in the memory of the employees involved. Unbiased mystery shopping allows managers to acquire specific examples from real-world interactions and relay that information to your team as a teaching moment. This provides managers and club operators the opportunity to eliminate unwanted behavior from the moment it’s recognized and turn a weakness into a strength.
Identification of Trends and Future Training Opportunities
Oh no! There seems to be an unwanted trend developing at your club. Could be an apathetic attitude towards upselling. Maybe the collars around your greens aren’t getting the attention they deserve. Where did that come from? You might be able to correct the behavior of a specific employee, but if it happened once, it might happen again. This is the perfect opportunity to update the employee handbook and code of conduct to ensure your employees understand the importance to these specific club operations and eliminate these trends once and for all – something you might never have identified without mystery shopping.
Objective Reporting and Benchmarking
Is your club making money? Yes? Good. But does that mean it’s a good business? Not necessarily. There are limitless variables when it comes to owning and operating a club, and when you’re reporting to your board, an ownership group or other stakeholders, it’s imperative you come armed with specific, objective reporting metrics. The way 59club USA delivers objective, data driven mystery shopping analysis gives you evidence instead of hearsay to tackle risk/reward opportunities with confidence.
Rewarding the Right Behavior
We’ve talked a lot about poor behavior and customer service here, but one of the most fundamentally positive aspects of mystery shopping is identifying and proving positive customer service interaction from a specific employee. Mystery shopping – and the objective data it produces – allows club managers to reward employees based on merit and not the status quo. It has become a common practice for our data to be included in the annual incentive/bonus calculations for managers at all levels of the club. It gives you another objective tool, beyond just the financial statement, to measure how a particular manager is doing in their area of responsibility. Rewarding employees in the right way creates champions and a positive, collaborative culture – undeniably one of the easiest paths to success in the business world.