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Steve:
This practice is not new to the industry, and the insights it uncovers can have a major impact on how your customers experience your brand.

Michael:
Mystery shopping, to me, is the ultimate measurement tool of how are your frontline employees properly administering your brand and service standards. And that's what we're going to measure.

Steve:
How mystery shopping impacts your customer experience on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at Walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and welcome back and thank you for listening. On The CX Leader Podcast we explore topics and themes to help leaders like you leverage all the benefits of your customer experience and help your customers and prospects want to do more business with you. Mystery shopping. It's that common practice where companies hire professional shoppers to evaluate and report on how your customers experience your business and gain valuable perspective on the customer journey. Retail, hotel, hospitality, restaurants, online, even casinos take advantage of the powerful insights provided by this practice. But like many things today, the pandemic has shifted how customer experience pros approach their practice, and we want to explore what mystery shopping is looking like today. Well, I'm very proud and happy to have Michael Mills on the program today to discuss this topic. Michael is the global vice president of sales for HS Brands International, a brand certainty company. And it's a broader umbrella, but it does include mystery shopping, loss prevention and compliance measurement solution provider. And he's going to help us talk about how this may or may not integrate with your CX activities at your company. Michael, thanks for taking the time to be a guest on The CX Leader Podcast.

Michael:
Hi, Steve. Thank you. I appreciate it. Looking forward to looking forward to the discussion.

Steve:
Actually, I'm just getting to know you a little bit. I'm really looking forward to the discussion, too. And I think this is so intriguing. You know, this is our 166th episode and we've never discussed mystery shopping, which is an old research guy, I can't believe that we haven't because this some of this stuff goes back, you know, 40, 50, 60 years in the evolution of market research. And it was all about a customer experience before we even knew what CX was. So maybe just for the perspective our audience, just give us a little of your own personal background, how you got in this business, and then maybe tell us a little bit more about HS Brands International.

Michael:
So I came to the business just because I was a salesman. I work with my brother. He founded this company 27, 28 years ago and is a salesperson. And I was selling human capital management software and then financial control software. And we weren't working together. We were kind of going our own directions. And what ended up happening was he really needed somebody to be out in Las Vegas permanently to really focus on our hospitality business. And he just couldn't be just back in Boston. And so we decided to give it a try about 12 years ago. So I came over to work with him and I started out just managing accounts, really learning the business and and slowly morphing into the sales world that I was meant to be in. As that was happening, our company was expanding greatly and really pushing to expand internationally. And so while in Vegas and selling and working and learning CX and learning the brand certainty model that we now that we now offer, it was really kind of a I'm just probably something that just likes to learn. And it was it was a really great learning process to really gradually learn this industry from the inside out. And then I was fortunate enough we were closing in Paris and opening an office in London. So I actually went and did that, opening the office in London, really integrated, making that kind of our international hub outside of outside of North America while we were expanding and we were opening offices in other parts of the world as well. And it really drove a lot of conversations and a lot of sales opportunities in international markets, which lend itself to different types of CX conversations and mystery shopping conversations. And it's just really been one long growing and learning experience and I feel really fortunate to have had it.

Steve:
Yeah. So it's interesting that you're so international, but when you think about it, the gaming industry, the hotel industry, the big retailers, these are global brands and global footprints. And so that that makes sense. And so these guys, they want a consistent experience, whatever they're doing and wherever they're doing it. Right?

Michael:
So I think, well, there's two things there. Right. So as companies grow internationally, a lot of them kind of historically would kind of silo their businesses based on region. That could be for any number of reasons. Sometimes it's just because instead of building internationally, they're acquiring other companies. Yeah. And so in the beginning, they may they may not really wanting to push new standards or new new SOP in a specific region that kind of happens over time and organically. What ends up happening is when they do want to make sure that things they maintain certain service standards across regions, they would employ somebody like us because there's very few companies in the world that actually can offer. Suite of services that we do and do so truly internationally, but the other thing that that that you see is just from a standard internal operations standpoint, it's just easier having one point of contact than hiring seven different mystery shopping or CX companies or whatever. It brings certainty style companies in different regions of the world. So all of those kind of pieces work together.

Steve:
Yeah, it's something I've seen in my career, too, is as companies expand internationally, they typically do it by acquisition. They say, oh, it's different in Europe, it's different in Asia. And then they've got big corporate accounts and they don't want different processes and different experiences when they're folks or when they're doing business globally. So it is sort of this natural progression of things, I think, as you get to these global brands.

Michael:
But just to just to close out that, just to close out that that piece, really what's been important to us hasn't been so much the ability to execute our services globally. We have strategically built offices in regions so that you're not just dealing with US based executives that are telling you what the the way to operate in India. You're going to talk to me and I'm going to bring in my Indian team and we're going to work with our Indian team to make sure that we're operating the way that we should in that particular region. And we've been very good about that. So I think that's that's really important

Steve:
Maybe for our listeners. Just give us a 101 on what mystery shopping is and then we'll unpack that and talk about how it might relate to CX, et cetera.

Michael:
To us the way to to look at mystery shopping is mystery shopping is is kind of like a surgical measurement approach. And and if you look at us as a company, one of the things that will often discusses, it's really about boots on the ground. So we have access to a few million mystery shoppers globally and that allows us to do our any number of things. Now, like you said, we can get a little bit more into how that relates to CX. But just a general look at mystery shopping. It could be anything from quickly getting SKU counts for a retailer that a hedge fund wants to acquire in India. And they want to go in and they want to make sure that the products are actually on the on the retail floor. But mystery shopping is really, to me, best use as a measurement tool. You develop brand and service standards and you spend money on training and learning how to train these SOP's and brand standards. And what we do is we then go in and we measure that. And while from a CX standpoint, you can get some level of measurement on on how your actual customers feel, they're not actually giving you feedback on the efficacy of specific aspects of your training or if you're properly meeting your service standards, because CX is great and powerful, but it's most approaches to it are somewhat limiting. So mystery shopping to me is the ultimate measurement tool of how are your frontline employees properly administering your brand and service standards? And that's what we're going to measure.

Steve:
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff there. And I don't want to start stealing your thunder, but I'm going to have a lot of ideas here for how CX pros could implement this. You know, Michael, just talk a little bit briefly about your core industry focus and some of the key characteristics of what you do for them and what the mystery shopping thing is without giving us any competitive information. But just talk about the differences between these some of these verticals that you focus on.

Michael:
So we as an organization, we like to take a very partner based approach. We don't like to build out cookie cutter products and solutions and come in and say this is exactly how it should be done. We like it to be more consultative. But along with that, we like to work in industries that we like personally. We work with sports teams, arenas, the entertainment industry, and obviously casino and hospitality is something that speaks to us as an organization. So we do focus there. We work a lot in the quick service restaurant industry, but really there's no limit. We entertain all manner of of projects and then we work with that client to looking at that brand standards and their service standards and hearing a little bit about what their core values are internally as a company and and how they may sit with ours. And we develop very targeted programs and they're very customized. So, I mean, all of this comes back to customer journey. And I think this is where that that kind of the crossover with traditional CX really comes into play. We're really trying to look at what is the position, a customer journey for somebody coming through the doors or even before they come through the doors and how they're interacting with the business and interacting with staff. And we're building out a questionnaire that allows us to really kind of not just in the "Yes…" or the old, "Did somebody do this yes or no?" We had some nuance to the way that we create questions. It's a little bit more kind of a market research approach. And we were just reporting back on are the people that are out representing your brand doing so in the way that they've been trained to do so, in the way that you would expect them to do so? And and I mean, so quick service restaurants, whether it's a drive through experience or actually dining in, you're sending in somebody that is operating like a normal customer. And then casinos are something that's also very, very close to us. And they can be a little bit more targeted because when you go into a quick service restaurant, you are going in to deal with the counter. You're making an order. You're probably reporting on cleanliness and marketing pop, anything like that. And then you're leaving. A casino is choose your own adventure, if you will, some kind of a situation where somebody doesn't necessarily always come into a casino to go to the restaurant, somebody doesn't necessarily always go talk to security. So really, it's about being a little bit more innovative and creating a journey to make sure that all of the types of interactions where hospitality and casino company are going to want to to learn. It's not so it's not so simple as this is just go in and do what you really do at a Burger King. It's way more targeted. But really, I think what this speaks to is with us as an organization, we just really want to innovate and we want to work and we don't we want to work with our partners to make sure that we're really devising approaches that are unique to them and unique to their needs and expectations.

Steve:
You know, on the quick service restaurant, that is one where you really it's a distributed business model and the big brands want a consistent experience across all their locations so that when you're on the road or you're in another city, you say, hey, I recognize that brand. The thing that's always fascinated me about casinos is they really pioneered some of the early data analytics in segmenting their customers and really knowing the total customer value. To me, the way that the customer experience in a hospitality casino in Las Vegas is just the permutations would blow your mind, I got to believe. And so somebody in that organization is thinking about how do we show up in total for our most important customers and all customers.

Michael:
So there's a few interesting aspects to that. One thing that I don't think people realize is the level of talent that you see at the top end of major casinos. These are all Ivy League and Ivy League MBAs across the board here. But yes, you are right. I mean, I don't think any business knows more about their their customers, their literal customers than than a casino, even from their lowest, quote unquote, financially valuable customer. They just have so much demographic information on there and they have so much habit on there because they know this is how often they come to our property. When they do, this is how long they sit at a slot machine. This is how much they're willing to spend at a blackjack table. This is what they do when they this is what they order when they go to a restaurant. So it really is a data rich environment. And it's it's really interesting to see how that plays out.

Steve:
Well, you know, Michael, a lot of our listeners are B2B, but one of the themes that we've always preached and we we constantly get reinforced and this is a perfect example, is that even in B2B, your expectations around customer experience are driven by your own personal B2C experiences. You know, there's only probably a couple of things that the customer more particular about than when they're spending their leisure dollars. You know, I mean, maybe they're maybe their home or their health care or some of their own financial services. But after that, you know, when you're spending your hard earned money to try to have a good time on vacation, you know, you're going to be pretty particular. And obviously, there's a lot of competition for those dollars. So the, you know, kind of the stakes of providing a good experience can't be much higher than in Las Vegas. I got to believe

Michael:
It's a very interesting thing. If you were to go to a if you would go to a casino in and maybe the Midwest, maybe one of Oklahoma has a massive casino industry, their day to day slot player is really the lifeblood. And that's actually probably the case for a lot of the downtown casinos in Las Vegas. But like you alluded to, what is considered the strip with the big, you know, the Bellagio and the big mega resorts that you think of when most people think of Las Vegas, they're thinking of the strip that has changed greatly. I mean, it's now it's the entertainment and FNB dollars that over time are just overtaking the gaming dollars. And that creates a different that creates a different discussion for the CX professional. It really becomes about the MGM famously rolled out M life and it really all became about the general experience. And when you look at M life and you look at kind of their approach to CX, it's really was more driven towards the overall experiences you could have in the MGM environment. Everything was about gaming a long time ago, everything was about what did this person bring to the table from a gaming standpoint and what could we provide them from from an experience standpoint, in the context of gaming, where really so much of the emphasis is now being put on having the right restaurants, putting the right talent in the showrooms and just having any sort of other experiences that can bring you up. So really is a different environment. It's a very interesting thing to be close to.

Steve:
My guest on the podcast this week is Michael Mills, he's the global vice president of sales for HS Brands International, and they are a brand certainty company. And we've been having a fascinating discussion about mystery shopping and how that applies to CX. I think as we're recording this podcast, we don't want to jinx us, but I think we are really starting to see some momentum of coming out of the COVID pandemic. From your perspective, did the customer behavior change? You know, many of the organizations have had to go digital real quick and also maybe any insights you have to how Vegas is recovering, because I think that would be a bellwether of getting back to, quote unquote, normal again.

Michael:
So the interesting thing is we don't know what normal is going to be. I personally am hoping that normal I wake up in 2023, 2022 and I can't really tell the difference between 2018. That's probably a little bit pie in the sky. That's probably being a little bit overly optimistic unfortunately, but I'm going to ride that out and hope that's the case. Las Vegas is incredibly interesting. I live, I live downtown in Las Vegas and I love the city. And it was a very sad and sobering reality. Early on in quarantine, I had I bought a mountain bike and I would drive out around downtown and drive to the strip. And I had a few really seeing Fremont Street, which is the the main old street downtown, completely empty was truly sad. I mean, this affects not not only our business, not only the nation, but all my friends are involved in this type of industry. But some positives. As the city started to open up, people came, and it was a very different it was a very different experience for people that were coming in. And it was a different experience for the the actual casino owners as well, because people were coming and they they weren't gambling at the same levels. It was kind of a different a different demographic of people coming. And it really created a lot of challenges. We did some very early research on it, on guest experience and how the general experience is being looked at. And what we found was people wanted to see activity. They wanted to know that hygiene was important to the property. So we looked at a bunch of different types of casinos here in town and we kind of hit different segments we found is the better experience was coming and it was directly correlated with with the visibility of seeing people constantly cleaning things. And how that's changing now, we don't know because we've got to kind of almost do a follow up study. We don't know how much the psyche has changed over the last year. But a year ago, one of the most important things about the experience to people coming into a casino suddenly wasn't the fountains. It wasn't the customer service. It was the visibility of seeing people proactively cleaning and dealing with hygiene issues in a way that normally wouldn't it wouldn't be something you would need to think about because the nice casinos are generally well-kept anyway. But it's not something that a customer would would would have as one of their most important things. And suddenly it was. And and that's something that the casinos obviously had to take into account.

Steve:
Yes, so there's a whole other kind of aspect to what the customer is expecting, and it's it's going to be overwhelming here for a little while, but I guess I'm just what is the status today with with casino capacity in Vegas? Because I just read a couple, like you mentioned, sports teams earlier. But I think I think in Texas, they're going to let the baseball teams go to full capacity again and…

Michael:
We're basically we're on the precipice. As of May 1st, Nevada went to 80 percent. On June 1st. We're supposed to go to one hundred percent. I believe the way that they're doing it, though, is I think the individual properties, I believe, have to get almost approval to go to full capacity. And I believe yesterday the Cosmopolitan, which is one of the main casinos on the strip, I believe, got full capacity, basically certification. I don't know if that means that they actually get to immediately or that is what allows them to go June 1st. But where we are is if you were to walk around Las Vegas tomorrow on Cinco de Mayo, I was out. Other than seeing some mass of people downtown doesn't really look any different than it ever would on any time. And that's actually been the case now for for a little bit. I can just feel this thing of people just got a really big reminder that life is precious. You have one life to live. We all just in some way or another, kind of lost a year of our lives. And we don't you know, we have a finite number of those and I think a lot of people are looking to to get out and live life. And that's obviously great for the wider economy. But that's very, very, very good for the Las Vegas economy. Back to kind of like the CX and mystery shopping standpoint, how that's affected. It's it's the conversations that are having at the high levels are really interesting right now, because I know other time in my in my life has there have been talks of almost like starting over. It's like, OK, we got to kind of start from from step one here because things change. Companies are changing the standard operating procedures to deal with the realities. But then you also have to deal with the customer experience aspect of just think about a McDonald's. Right. Or Burger King or whatever. Somebody walks through the front door and every single time they're being confronted with the same menu with maybe a new menu item. And the experience is generally the same. Well, now, when you get there, right, as you're getting to the door, you are being confronted with a command. And that command is that you need to put a mask on. Once you actually come through that door, you're walking and you're walking and you're looking at the screen to make your order. You're also confronted with these little circles on the floor that are telling you where to stand. Like these are just fundamentally just different things that we all of a sudden have to deal with. And I don't know how long they're going to be there and I don't know what this is going to be. But that's just fundamentally changes the guest experience. And from a mystery shopping side, what I think a lot of CX professionals probably missed because the toolbox ends up somewhat being a little limiting when you're just kind of doing the traditional guest feedback is when you ask somebody in a survey about their experience, you only have so many questions. I mean, sometimes the casinos can get away with asking one hundred questions, but that's going to be very limiting to them. Your average person that's going to do any sort of CX surveying, responding to surveys from a McDonald's interaction, I mean, maybe you have ten questions. Maybe. Now you're very limited on what you can actually get feedback on. Whereas now for us, from a mystery shopping standpoint, we can make sure that the signage is there while actually making sure that your team are adhering to all of these different all of these different SOPs. We can also even provide some feedback. So I think that's one of the things that we're going to see here. And I think one of the trends that we're seeing personally is that this understanding of listening, it might have been easy to just go out and survey some people and get some feedback and make some changes based on that. But with this crazy changes in SOPs and just the general experience, you really need to be more targeted. We need to be… CX professionals just need to be more surgical now and understand that to be tactical and properly make the changes where they need to be made. You have to be properly measuring. And and that's understanding that the toolbox is just a lot wider than traditional CX surveying.

Steve:
Michael, we've reached that part of the show where I always ask our guests for the take home value. That's your best tip for a CX pro that what you really want them to take away from today's discussion and what they could apply at their own organization either later today or next time they go to work and enhance what they're doing for their customers. So, Michael Mills, please give us your best tip for our The CX Leader Podcast.

Michael:
Well, first of all, let me just say thank you, Steve. I really appreciate the opportunity here. This was a fun discussion and and so thank you for that. What I really think that the CX community needs to understand is I think because of some of the technologies in the last 10, 15 years, a lot of the CX community is really just heavily focused on serving customer feedback and what I think because of the changes in SOPs and fundamental changes in training that have been and will be taking place because of the new COVID realities, and we actually still don't even know what some of those are, I think it's really important that CX professionals understand that they need to widen the toolbox. And it's not always it's not always just, OK, well, we're just going to ask the customers how much they like the experience and then we're going to kind of drive everything off, that. There's really opportunity, whether it's I mean, through loss prevention, studying, studying some of some of the risk mitigation techniques, all of that funnels back to mystery shopping and really measuring the efficacy of your training. And and then they're all pieces of the pie. And if you put them all together, they actually tell the bigger story. So if I was going to say anything to to a CX professional, if you're looking at whether your investment is in surveys right now, you're probably paying a lot of money for a lot of bells and whistles that are probably a little less valuable than you think. And if you scale back a little bit of that spend on your surveys and spread a little bit more of that money out to other other aspects of the toolbox, basically expand kind of your view. You're going to learn a lot more and it's going to allow you to be a lot more tactical and how you implement, change and drive a better experience for your customer.

Steve:
Hey, thanks. That's a great tip. Thank you again, Michael Mills, for being a guest on the podcast. And if anybody would like to continue the dialog, how can they find you? Give me your website or your LinkedIn profile or something.

Michael:
So we can be found at hsbrands.com. And honestly, I mean, I always feel free, anyone can email me at michael.mills@hsbrans.com. And I would love to have a conversation about any aspect of this. Again, this was great. I really appreciate it. And feel free to reach out next time you're in wonderful, fabulous Las Vegas because we're coming back and it's going to be great.

Steve:
You're a fascinating guest. I really appreciate. And I think we could probably have talked for another hour or so. But if you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or any of our other podcasts or about how Walker can help you with your business's customer experience, feel free to email me a podcast@walkerinfo.com. Be sure to check out our website, cxleaderpodcast.com, to subscribe to the show, find all of our previous episodes, podcast series, contact information. You can even drop us a note to let us know how we're doing or give us an idea for a future podcast. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker, we're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success. You can read more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening and we'll see you again next time.

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