This month, Ethos Consultancy’s team of mystery shoppers went undercover at four selected steakhouses around Dubai, to find out whether customer service was well done or totally rare

This month: Steakhouses

The chosen locations were:

• Butcher Shop & Grill, JBR — 71%
• Inferno, Dubai Marina Walk — 69%
• The Meat Co, Souk Al Bahar — 65%
• St. Tropez, Century Village — 58%

Each mystery shopper is instructed to look out for the following:
Appearance
Sales and service
Overall experience

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The expert analysis:
In this month’s Service Spy we compare the service delivery performance at four of Dubai’s most popular steakhouses.

Unless you’re vegetarian, I bet the word steakhouse brings a few favourites to mind. Does your favourite lean more towards the steak quality, cooking technique, or perhaps where the product originates from? Or will your loyalty hold true only if the service is consistently brilliant?

Most would agree it’s a bit of everything — but if the service is actively terrible, diners rarely return and may even share their negative experience with others.

Looking at this month’s overall mystery shopping score, 66% (an average of all visits), the performance across these four restaurants was surprisingly low compared to previous months.

So what went wrong? As the results graph indicates, the sales and service quality category let all restaurants down.

With scores as low as 41% in this category, staff lost points for failing to make suggestions to their customers about drinks, starters and appetisers — and only a quarter of our mystery shoppers reported their waiter checking they were happy with their meal and experience at least twice during the course of the visit.

Similarly, only 25% said their waiters introduced themselves when handing over the menus.
Fortunately, it’s not all bad news for this month’s four steakhouses. Although there is definite room for improvement in the sales and service category, premises- and food-related scores were very acceptable.

Some other highlights from this month’s shopper reports were that:
• 100% of waiters were described as friendly, upbeat and outgoing;
• 75% of waiters repeated orders back to the customer to check it was correct;
• 87% of waiters cleared their customer’s table within a reasonable amount of time after the meal was complete;
• 100% of waiters offered appropriate condiments and wet napkins automatically without having to be prompted;
• 100% of waiters honoured special requests made by customers without having to be reminded;
• 75% of our shoppers indicated they would be very likely or likely to recommend the outlet to family and friends.