Hopefully your mystery shopping program offers a robust suite of analytical reports to really dive into the data collected. After all, this is a great method of compiling objective data about your operational procedures, and is always a wonderful complement to a customer feedback program.
One report that seems to be under utilized, but can be extremely helpful, is the cross tab report. Essentially this looks at two data points to see if there is a correlation.
What are some examples?
Day of week vs overall score. Does your overall score fluctuate depending on the day of the week? Or, go one step further and look at time of day – is there a particular shift where performance seems to struggle?
New and returning customers vs overall satisfaction. Many mystery shopping programs will ask shoppers if they are a new or returning customer. Use that data to look more closely at the “subjective” questions you may incorporate into your program, such as rating the overall experience, or based on the experience, would the mystery shopper be likely to visit and/or recommend to others? While mystery shopping is typically an objective snapshot, adding a subjective question can give you more bang for your buck.
These are just two examples, but it can give you a sense of how you can look at data differently. Below are some tips when using the cross tab report:
- Make sure the two questions “make sense” to compare. As an example, you don’t need to compare the cleanliness of the dining area with cashiers attempting to upsell. It’s an extreme example, but it’s easy to see how one has absolutely no impact on the other. Make sure one question has an impact on the other for best results.
- Don’t just focus on company wide data – slice and dice by district or region, or even drill down to a specific location. This can be helpful if you have concerns about a location or group of stores – you can quickly run a cross tab to identify potential issues quickly.
- Make sure your mystery shopping survey is designed well. You can always tweak your survey as your needs change, but starting with a solid survey, taking into consideration all of your goals for using the program most effectively, will give you a wide range of options for analyzing the data over time.
Cross tab reports are one of many that are available to analyze your mystery shopping data. Check back to see what else is available – we’ll be sharing more report tips & tricks in future blogs.
