Tools | Quinn Bowman
One of the more useful online features Satisfaction Services offers clients is a tool that allows them to look at a particular question and, with a mouse click, find out which specific restaurants are failing in that area.
The data can also be broken down on a year-to-date basis so long-term trends can be seen. Most of his clients, Albert says, use weekly evaluations. This makes for a large amount of evaluations that can be used for trend analysis. “If you have 100 evaluations that you’ve conducted, then the results are pretty accurate,” he says.
Furthermore, the weekly setup fits well with the way restaurant employees think about their jobs, Albert says. Because the employees delivering the service think about their work in terms of weeks, weekly evaluations tend to produce higher weekly scores, he says.
Each secret shopper visit costs between $35 and $40. Quick-service or full-service restaurant evaluators are reimbursed for their food purchase and have a spending limit.
But is the money well spent? Albert claims that some past clients, with whom he had a personal relationship, shared sales data with him that indicated a strong correlation between good evaluation scores and high sales. “I can say with confidence that 100 percent of time locations that consistently scored high had sales increases year after year,” he says.
One of Albert’s clients agrees. Samir Abou-Diwan, who owns a Wingstop franchise, directly attributes his increased sales and improved customer service to Satisfaction Services evaluations. His buffalo-chicken wing eatery boasts a 20 percent increase in sales in 2006 and nine consecutive perfect Satisfaction Services evaluations.
When Albert first started his company in 1989 it was out of frustration. As a longtime restaurant owner, he had a hard time finding a satisfactory customer-service evaluation service. “I spent most of my life in the restaurant business and used companies that did what we do [now]. I never found a product I could depend on. I told my wife one day that if you did this and did it very well you could be really successful. We took our time and studied the process. We spent the time and money and tools to do it well,” he says.
The online operation for Satisfaction Services went into effect in 2000. The process is constantly being retooled, Albert says. “We used to do it all on paper, and I don’t know how we did it.”
His professional restaurant management background gave Albert the tools he needed to evaluate what customer services worked and what didn’t, especially where food was being served.
Albert likes to think of the state of customer service in the restaurant industry as a great opportunity, not a shameful black eye. “In all industries, even the high-end ones, the expectation of service at the consumer level is very low. Most people feel that if they can go out and go buy something or eat dinner somewhere and not get abused badly they had a good day. This also presents an opportunity to provide better service,” he says. “A little bit is all it takes to really knock it out of the park.”
One of the biggest customer-service problems Albert sees in the quick-service industry is the tendency to sacrifice friendly service for speed, and accuracy at the drive-thru.
“Friendliness of staff is big. A lot of times quick doesn’t equate with friendly. A lot of times quick is overemphasized as opposed to friendly,” he says. Part of the problem with quick-service customer service is that the younger generation that typically provides the service needs to be educated about common courtesy, he says.
Albert noticed a big change in the way McDonald’s has changed this dynamic in its workforce. “What I’ve noticed is that their service is still quick but there’s a balance there of courtesy and friendliness in the process. It is dramatic to me because I am a student of it,” he says.
The drive-thru issue, on the other hand, is simply a matter of giving customers what they ordered. If that accuracy could be improved, quick-service restaurant efficiency could go up 40 percent, Albert says.
The bottom line, however, is that Satisfaction Services’s clients really want a way to distinguish themselves from the competition, he says. Albert’s company even offers a comparative analysis service that will show a client how the competition is scoring, which can help to motivate staff and management. Albert’s service simply allows clients to evaluate their performance from within and to get a perspective on their progress.
Even though Albert started out evaluating the restaurant industry, he says judging customer service in a Best Buy is not much different from evaluating the Taco Bell drive-thru. “In concept it doesn’t matter what industry it is. The key is to understand the experience that the customer is having using a program to monitor that experience.”