What was the problem at Signorizza?
At Signorizza, mystery shoppers were already in place, and were stopped during the lockdown I believe (I wasn't there yet).
At the end of last year, we thought it might be worthwhile to reintroduce these mystery shoppers, for the simple reason that we have a different view of customer perception than the one we get when we look at restaurants or Google reviews.
Customers can leave feedback when things aren't going as well as they'd like, and I needed feedback on key points of the service, and mystery shoppers are normally neutral in their feedback.
What concrete solutions has Smice been able to provide?
What was interesting about Smice was their approach. Their customer portfolio was also interesting, because they have players in the sit-down restaurant business, and the fact that we could model the questionnaire according to our desires in order to convince us.
The questionnaire could be adapted over time, which made sense.
What do you think is Smice's added value in terms of services?
Listening, and the fact that it's not a gas factory to get them. My contacts with them were very simple and very quick.
We organized several visios to adjust the questionnaire, and carried out a test wave in four restaurants to enable us to reshape the questionnaire or adapt it as best we could.
Often, you might say to yourself that you're going to ask a question like that, and then suddenly, when you see the wave, you realize that it doesn't fit at all, and that the question isn't appropriate after all.
It was really good because it gave us a visual on the questionnaires and their returns, and on the quality of the auditors.
Why would you recommend Smice?
For all the reasons I've already mentioned. The first is that a mystery shopper gives us another view of the service we can provide.
Today, we rely a lot on all kinds of ratings: our Google ratings, our reviews, our numbers of reviews, which can sometimes be truncated, because we don't necessarily ask for positive reviews, and we end up with more negative reviews. It's much rarer for people to take the time to put in a positive review than a negative one.
I think it's really another management tool, both for a franchise network like ours, and for the franchisees themselves, who can set things in motion.
The feedback I got from my franchisees was: "Listen Sylvia, it's cool because it allows us to put the emphasis back on the little problems we don't necessarily see anymore".
I find that the feedback we get from the different auditors is very constructive, and we don't get the feeling that they're just pointing out things that aren't going well, so it's pretty well taken up by the network and put to good use behind it.
