Auditing your Customer Needs
The concept of 'Customer Auditing', or 'Mystery Shopping' as it is more commonly known, has been used for many years by the retail and hospitality industries to provide greater understanding of customer needs and expectations.
Customer auditing can apply equally to a café or a 5 star restaurant, to a B&B or a leading hotel chain, to a small town or to an entire tourism region.
Customer auditing is different to focus group research. It's an anonymous and objective assessment of what you do and how well you do it. If conducted correctly, customer auditing should identify ways to close the gap between what customers expect from a product or experience and what the business is actually delivering to them.
Independent 'auditors' sample the product as an ordinary customer would experience it. Staff and management do not know when the audit will take place and the 'auditor' pays normal price for all services (usually reimbursed later by the client). However, while the auditors look and act like any other customer, they are trained to carefully observe, to objectively assess and to systematically record.
Customer auditing can not only provide a snapshot of how a business is performing, but can also highlight those areas in which investing extra effort and resources could have a major impact on profitability. Conversely, it can also identify things that are not particularly important or relevant to the customer experience. In other words, it can show where resources should be most cost-effectively allocated in a business.
While the concept may seem simple and easily executed, it is important to approach this research in a systematic way and to use rigorous methodology to: 1. devise evaluation criteria, 2. undertake assessment, 3. process the results.
Several companies offer customer auditing services and there are now also specialists in such research for small to medium tourism businesses, and even for entire tourism regions.
The assessment may cover aspects such as:
- The customer planning process and their initial contact with you
- Their first impressions of your tourism product
- The presentation of your product
- The quality of key facilities and services, such as food and beverage, accommodation etc
- The quality of general amenities
- Final impressions and whether the customer would be recommending your product to others.
The first audit will establish a 'benchmark'. Subsequent audits will then be able to determine how a business is performing against the original results, as well as identify any changes in customer need and expectation.
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