Service Spy

The feedback from Ethos Consultancy's team of mystery shoppers focuses on coffee-shop cafes at Dubai Mall.

This month the feedback from Ethos Consultancy’s team of mystery shoppers focuses on coffee-shop cafés at Dubai Mall — were the staff’s service skills piping hot, luke warm or cold and tasteless?

This month:

The chosen cafés within Dubai Mall were:

• Caribou Café
• Costa
• Starbucks
• Second Cup

THE WHAT:
Caterer Middle East has partnered up with customer service experts Ethos Consultancy to highlight F&B service standards at outlets across the UAE. Each month, we’ll reveal mystery shoppers’ assessments of four different F&B outlets, to explore what these venues are doing right and what could be improved.

THE WHY:
This isn’t about catching F&B outlets with their trousers down: by measuring performance and providing expert advice on areas for improvement, we want to help better these operations — and the industry in general.

THE HOW:
Ethos Consultancy’s trained mystery shoppers are given a specific selection of outlets. Each shopper visits their assigned restaurant and dines as usual. Within 24 hours of every experience, each shopper fills out an online report, providing Ethos consultants with the information they require to offer constructive advice.

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Each mystery shopper is looking out for key aspects in the following areas: 

• Appearance
• Sales and service
• Overall experience

The Expert Analysis
This month Service Spy is all about cafés, with our shoppers visiting four well known coffee chains located within Dubai Mall.

Our top two outlets, Starbucks (89%) and Caribou (86%) were very close and should both be extremely proud of their staff.

The mystery shopping reports concerning these two brands indicated impressive product knowledge from their staff, who had the confidence to make specific product suggestions to their customers — our shoppers were being asked if they’d like extra cream, or even if they’d like a muffin to go with their coffee!

It was also great to see the right questions being asked. For example, at one of the Caribou visits our shopper indicated they had a preference for caramel-flavoured coffee and asked what was available.

Without hesitation, the waiter serving this customer asked if they would prefer a hot or cold drink.

It sounds simple, but this is a very important question and in this case led to the purchase of a ‘Caramel Cooler’: a drink that would not have been considered had the waiter not used his initiative to help find the perfect drink to meet this customer’s particular requirements.

Even if a customer is content to stick with their traditional hot coffee, they will walk away from this experience feeling like their waiter was extremely helpful and actually cared about meeting their needs, all because of a simple question.

Our two lower scoring chains, Second Cup (70%) and Costa (57%) also received a few great reports, but these weren’t consistent.