Mystery Shopper Programs

A series of visits by “mystery shoppers” posing as typical guests is widely considered to be the most insightful method by which you can honestly assess how much your properties are meshing with the vision and experience you want to present to your guests, and how your facilities stack up to your nearest competitors – a key component of your CEM [Customer Experience Management].  HDS will help you design, develop, and regularly execute a reliable system to test your front-facing operation’s strengths and weaknesses against your own customized performance standards.

All our evaluators are well trained and impartial – and unlike many of our competitors we only employ seasoned veterans of the hospitality industry, pro operators and staff, not members of the general public to carry out these roles. All our trained and skilled professionals are extremely discreet, and they will not interfere with the normal flow of service or impede operations in any way. They observe, they meticulously document, and they immediately upload their reports with supporting documentation and imagery onto our company’s secure servers.

As a foundational method, we construct several customized detailed and realistic scenarios which incorporate a diverse array of elements that authentically emulate real guest experiences. They’re designed to be conducted during different time periods, seasons, and so on for a proper range of data. These allow for comprehensive assessments of the various services and interactions that occur regularly within your hospitality environment. We craft these scenarios after first working with you to prepare a detailed needs assessment. You define your own objectives, identify presumed pain points, and we focus on your specific instructions – which metrics to measure and improve – and we define your bespoke evaluation tools based on those parameters. We confirm that real guest experiences align with your stated brand identity and mission and check that your brand identity matches your actual staff culture. We scrub all public data from your social media platforms, major review sites, reservation interfaces, and in-house comment cards. Properly aligned with all these feedback channels we can ensure effective and corrective progress is made.

Our evaluation criteria are based on SMART methodology [i.e. specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound]. They’re transparent, fair, and consistent and are applied uniformly and reliably by our evaluators. To provide a comprehensive insight, they include both quantitative and qualitative measures which are compared to historical results from your properties. Our teams are provided with proprietary checklists that gauge hundreds of wide-ranging, diverse data points to give you an exhaustive and thorough look inside your operation. The “shops” are scheduled in such a way as to cover a true, representative sample of service areas, times, and situations and they are monitored and supervised closely.