I worked at McDonalds for 5 years. I know, I know… that’s a story for a different blog! Anyways, when I worked there we would get Secret Shopped all the time and of course, you always wanted to get a high score. So you ended up just practicing the correct protocol all the time because you just never knew whether you were being shopped or not. So you became very good at always greeting with “Hi, may I take you order please” and always asking “Would you like some fries with that?” and finishing with “Thank you and have a great day!” We always knew we had to keep busy because “if there was time to lean, there was time to clean!” All large corporations utilize Secret Shops because they know it works to help create the kind of wonderful and consistent experience for their customers.
At Northwest Personal Training and Northwest Women’s Fitness Club, we also use a Secret Client Evaluation process which evaluates our team on whether we are delivering the type of service that we all envision. By keeping it ‘secret’, it ensures that our team doesn’t just shine when they know they are being evaluated but instead, they follow protocol and procedures all the time because they just never know when they are being evaluated. But it’s important to note that our team does know they are getting evaluated, they just don’t know when. Plus we give them the check-list of what they will be evaluated on so there are no surprises and the expectations are very clear.
We have a Secret Evaluation process for all important aspects of our business including an evaluation for the Initial Complimentary Training session, Initial Phone Call, Initial Tour, Ongoing Training appointments, Group Fitness classes and more. We have created a check-list of everything that should happen in each of these scenarios as the ideal vision for the client experience.
When we assign a ‘client’ to perform these evaluations, we have used:
• Actual Clients
• Friends
• Prospective Clients
• Business Associates
We provide them with a Free Personal Training session ($70 value) as a gift to them for taking the time to go through the process and to complete the evaluation form.
At Northwest Personal Training, we strive for world-class consistency and excellence in everything we do and have found this program to be invaluable for us. We hope it helps you too.
Yours in health, fitness and business,
Sherri McMillan
ps. If you don’t want to have to spend the time to create your own evaluations and check-lists, we sell the license to utilize our systems. It will definitely save you a lot of time and be ready to implement immediately. If you’re interested, you can email our Fitness Education Director Kari Schunk at kari@nwpersonaltraining.com
