Multi-Location Secret Visit Program
Brands need a consistent stream of unbiased insight from the field in order to make important operational and strategic decisions. Employees are often too easily identified, naturally biased, and too busy to provide enough consistent insight to act on. Unfortunately, hiring a third-party to gather unbiased insight about your stores, your sites, or your products can be prohibitively expensive due to the geographic scope and the type of talent needed to deliver high quality research, insights, and recommendations.
Ceatro Group is committed to finding ways to drive the cost of getting good insights down so more brands can utilize them as tools for management and innovation.
Our new Multi-Location Secret Visit Program does just that – it significantly lowers the cost of research per site to between $500-$1000 per store by providing research services to multiple brands in one geographic market on each trip. Each research project is unique and treated as an independent effort; we just stay longer in each location and do more projects in that location in order to reduce the barriers to high-quality insights.
This program includes:
- Between 10 – 24 geographic locations per year, multiple sites in each geography for each client
- Custom research designed with each client to ensure it drives relevant business decisions
- Custom designed research tools and output formats
- A highly trained consultant-researcher conducting research at each site
- Location reports including videos, recordings, images, and trip summaries; optional quarterly and annual reports; meetings with research team as desired
- Option to change research goals during program year
- First few anchor clients help set 2017-2018 geographic locations
Research Ideas – Our team has spent more than 15 years doing onsite research for clients and delivering actionable insights and recommendations. Here is a non-exclusive sample of location-specific research projects that could be a nice fit for the Multi-Location Secret Visit Program:
- New Program Roll Out: Engage staff to observe and test effectiveness of new corporate program roll outs (new menu item, new marketing language, new customer satisfaction surveying, new uniform standards, new processes, etc.)
- Customer Buying Behavior: Observe and document customers purchasing specific items and interacting with staff
- Customer Service Experience: Engage multiple retail associates in specific store chain with 5 specific customer needs to document responses, speed to resolution, and impact on sales
- Shelf Placement: Observe and document shelf placement and other marketing standards for a specific product line
- Problem Resolution Effectiveness: Present specific or broad problem to staff and management then observe and document service and potential resolution
- Marketing Standards: Observe and document product specific marketing campaigns in and around 4 retail chains that carry the specific product to determine if stores are meeting brand standards and if it relates to product performance in specific stores
- Location Standards: Observe and document operational and marketing standards at franchisees to assess effectiveness of standards on sales and effectiveness of corporate standards roll out
- All of the above: Broad service, operations, and marketing observation and documentation for overall improvement
Using the Insights and Recommendations – Our clients use the insights and recommendations from location specific research to inform and drive business and create more value for the organization and the customers. For example: negotiating with retail or franchisee partners, improving employee training, adjusting new program roll outs or marketing efforts, informing customer experience redesigns, adding color to investor and board of director reports, creating an ongoing repository of insights for upcoming projects, resolving specific problems, keeping the leadership team informed, and aligning location specific staff and corporate staff on shared goals.