I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count.
A client comes to me and says, “Look, we’ve got a real problem at this location. But that one over there is fine, we’re not worried about that one.”
We run the evaluations. And more often than not, they’ve got it the wrong way around.
The store they were losing sleep over? Actually doing reasonably well. The one they weren’t worried about? That’s where things were quietly falling apart.
It’s not that these business owners aren’t paying attention. It’s that the information reaching them has already been filtered by the time it lands on their desk. It goes from staff to a store manager, from store manager to an area manager, and so on. By the time it gets to you, it’s been shaped. Not always deliberately. But shaped.
And I’ll be honest, customer surveys don’t really close that gap either. A customer can walk out of your store without buying a thing, rate the experience a 10 out of 10, and you’ll record that as a win. What the survey didn’t tell you is that your staff member never asked for the sale, never captured their details, never hit the markers that actually matter.
Good vibes. No process.
The only way to really know what’s happening is to experience it the way your customers do. Not through a report. Not through a survey filled out after the fact. Through a real person walking in off the street and going through the whole thing.
That’s when the picture starts to look different.
And once you know where the actual gaps are, everything gets a lot easier. Your training becomes targeted. Your conversations with managers become specific. You stop throwing resources at the wrong problem.
Most businesses are working off assumptions. The ones that tend to stay ahead are the ones who actually go and check.