One of the most important parts of the onboarding process and getting your mystery shop program started is determining the question set you want to use on your shop form. During this process, we do share sample templates with you so that you can get an understanding of how similar clients in your specific industry set their forms up, but it’s important to ensure that the questions being asked reflect your steps of service and the standards you hold your team to.
Below are some important reminders to keep in mind as you go through the form creation process.
Question Design, Form Length, and Overall Flow
We recommend grouping your questions into sections, such as cleanliness, service, timing, management, product quality, etc. The form should flow in a way that would reflect the natural cadence of the shopper’s experience. Questions should follow the same format throughout the form; either always asked as questions or phrased as statements. Questions should be worded in a way that forces objective answers with some open text boxes for shoppers to provide their narratives on their experience. For example, instead of asking ‘did you receive your meal in a timely manner’, define what timely manner means to you; ‘did you receive your meal within 8 minutes’. Regarding form length, it would depend on the type of shop, but we recommend keeping it as direct as possible and asking the questions that you deem the most important to the overall success of your business.
Answer Option Structure
Answer options are most often set up in a picker form; we recommend using answer options such as Yes|No or Agree|Disagree, with the understanding that sometimes you will have to use a middle option such as ‘Somewhat’ or ‘Neutral’ to allow for those questions that contain some grey area. It’s best to define that grey area from the beginning so that shoppers and our quality assurance team are always scoring and grading shops consistently. You also have the option to ask, check all that apply’ questions which we recommend using when you can to shorten the form. For example, was the employee properly attired; please check all that apply, and then a list of options such as hair properly groomed, uniform clean, shirt tucked in, cap or hairnet worn, company branded attire only, etc.
Points and Weighting
You want the questions that hold the most value to you and your business to hold more weight on the form. You can do this by individual question or by section weighting. It’s important to keep in mind that the overall point total does not matter as our system will always take the entire average for the shop to determine the overall score; points achieved divided by points possible. You can add bonus questions that allow the shop to achieve more than 100% or to make up for questions that may have been marked down. You can have questions that have no point value at all, which is a great way to get feedback about subjective questions without having it affect the overall score. It’s also important to determine what overall score you are looking to achieve and that your team and your staff know what the goal is, especially if it’s tied to employee bonuses.
We have a dedicated and experienced client services team that will assist you in this process to ensure the form flows properly, questions are properly constructed, and the weighting makes sense; but the actual questions will always come from you. While you can change your form and the questions at any time, we do recommend keeping the core of your form as consistent as possible so that your overall reporting reflects a steady set of data points.