Selecting a mystery shopping company – why we are different

Hospitality Checkpoint’s approach to mystery shopping is more from an angle of hospitality consulting as opposed to being a generic mystery shopping provider with a checklist. As hospitality consultants we set up a mystery shopping program for our clients from a standpoint of extensive experience and professionalism from the beginning process to initiating the secret shopper program.

As customer service consultants a typical 2-hour secret shopper service is a full service complete facility inspection that involves an agent performing a restaurant mystery shop of a server in the dining room followed by an integrity check and bartender theft prevention audit at the bar. Services also include, where applicable, audits of the overall facility condition, management staff, bussers, cocktail servers, host staff and food & beverage quality and presentation. Also inclusive with our mystery shopping services is a recorded call of how staff his handling telephone procedures.

What differentiates Hospitality Checkpoint’s customer experience consulting is its highly distinguished restaurant industry leading bar loss prevention services. Bartender theft prevention shops or “bar spotting” as it is known in the restaurant and bar industry is an art form so to speak and really can only be conducted by an undercover shopper that has hands on bartending experience. Bartenders have behind the bar working nuances that can only be identified by other experienced bar staff personnel and it can be near impossible for a lay secret shopper to detect. An inexperienced restaurant shopper may have bartender theft happening right in front of them and still not be able to identify an integrity theft problem going on. This can be rather damaging when a mystery shopping agency reports to its client that no integrity issues were observed when in fact they actually was bartender theft occurring.

Hospitality Checkpoint only employs well-seasoned hospitality workers as bar spotters in our bar theft prevention audits. That is the only way that a mystery shopping program will work properly is with a professional “bar spotter” or otherwise the client risks receiving flawed data from its integrity shop. Another mystery shopper agency may state they can adequately produce a viable integrity shop of HCP caliber but a simple restaurant spotter can never match the solid track record of the bartender theft detection agents we deploy.

Because Hospitality Checkpoint only employs expreinced hospitality personnel, this makes our agents extremely qualified to be a restaurant secret shopper. Our mystery shopping services are particularly detailed because our agents know exactly what they should be looking when conducting a secret shopper program of a restaurant dining room. Other mystery shopper companies have secret shoppers that don’t understand the dynamics of a restaurant. They may report a delay in service without explanation where an HCP Operative may observe the delay was caused by a freshly seated 12-top table and report their customer service accordingly. This mixing of the subjective and objective viewpoints makes our restaurant mystery shopper reports highly dynamic and much more useful as a training tool. Albeit there are always clients that choose not to have any “objective” viewpoints omitted from their mystery shopping report and only have “subjective” findings included in the secret shopper report. In this case we include with their secret shopping services report a special section titled “Agent’s Opinions” so they don’t miss out on any potential gems of information.