8 Benefits of Restaurant Mystery Shopping You Don’t Get from Yelp Reviews
Do restaurants still need mystery shopping programs when they can simply extract customer feedback from sites like Yelp, Google and Facebook? I have been designing and managing restaurant mystery shopping programs for over 13 years and have been asked some version of the above question a few times. It’s a valid question to ask. After all, both online review sites and restaurant mystery shopping programs are important sources of customer feedback. But that is where the similarities end…
A Night of Mystery Shopping
The bartender caught me staring, again.
“Do you think they know what we’re doing?” I whispered. My friend Aliki and I averted our gaze as the bartender eyed us suspiciously.
It was 8:17 p.m., we were 28% of the way to my dining budget, and I had 40 minutes before we could leave the beer garden.
Such is the world of mystery shopping, or in this case, bar auditing.
Blink’s Restaurant Mystery Shopping Featured in Washingtonian Magazine
Blink Research was featured in the September 2017 issue of Washingtonian Magazine for its work managing mystery shopping programs for restaurant groups. Check out the article here!
Blink Mystery Shopping Helps D.C. Restaurants Up Their Game
Perhaps, like me, the last time you heard of mystery or secret shoppers was in the 1990s, but the industry is apparently still thriving. The Mystery Shoppers Providers Association Americas (MSPA) values the industry at $1.5 billion and estimates that there are 1.5 million mystery shoppers across diverse industries worldwide.