Refining service

Editor's note: Lisa Heutel is a freelance writer based in St. Louis, Mo.

Gasoline companies claim that a high-octane blend will put more giddyap in your Mustang, but for most drivers, gas is gas. When your tank is running low, unless a price war is raging between local service stations, you're likely to frequent the place where the cashier is friendly and the attendant is happy to help you check the air pressure in your tires.

To make sure its employees are doing their best to draw customers to its stations, Texaco two years ago introduced an excellence program called Building Tomorrow Together that uses mystery shopping to evaluate each of Texaco's wholesale and retail gas stations and truck stops.

In the past, some employees of firms using mystery shopping have seen it as a way for the company to spy on them or punish them for unsatisfactory performance. But companies have learned that for mystery shopping to be effective, it can't be seen as an extension of Big Brother. Rather, as in the case of Texaco, it should be tied to incentive programs that reward employees for superior performance and create a team-like atmosphere.

In the Building Tomorrow Together program, the evaluation process is used as a positive tool for improving the satisfaction of visitors to its 14,000 U.S. Texaco locations. All station managers, truck stop owner-operators and employees are eligible to earn recognition awards based heavily on the evaluations of mystery shoppers.

To conduct the mystery shops, Texaco has partnered with Maritz Marketing Research Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Maritz Inc., St. Louis, Mo. The criteria used to evaluate each location were developed by Texaco as the standards for its business. Points for image and customer satisfaction make up the bulk of the possible score each location can earn. "We see image and customer satisfaction as the two most important aspects of building our business," says Dale Northup, Texaco's manager of resale marketing, "and so far, we've seen improvement in these critical areas after completing the first two years of the Building Tomorrow Together program."

"These areas are targeted by our research because in an industry where most other aspects, such as the product, are equal, image and customer satisfaction can often distinguish one company from another in the eyes of the customer," says Jeff Amato, the Texaco national account director for Maritz Performance Improvement Co., another Maritz Inc. subsidiary.

Image and customer satisfaction are not the only areas that have shown marked improvement since the program began. "Our program results have shown a direct correlation between image/customer satisfaction scores and total annual gasoline sales volume," says Northup.

Image enhancement

Maritz and Texaco have taken things a step further in some regions. Included in the program is a step-by-step image enhancement process designed to improve the appearance of retail facilities that need special assistance in attaining their overall goals. Any location scoring 65 percent or below in the image category of their evaluation is flagged, and the owner-operator, marketing consultant-supervisor and Texaco headquarters are notified. The consultant-supervisor then meets with the owner-operator to discuss specific improvements for the location. After 120 days, both the consultant-supervisor and the owner-operator visit the location again to evaluate the improvements. The process has been so successful it will be expanded to all Texaco locations this year.

The Building Tomorrow Together program also includes competitive research. In addition to shopping all of the Texaco locations, Maritz shoppers visit competing locations and evaluate them based on Texaco standards and criteria. The results of these baseline shops after two years of the program show that Texaco is ahead of its competition in delivering customer satisfaction.

Gaining popularity

With all this success, why is mystery shopping just now gaining popularity among companies like Texaco? "Customer satisfaction is becoming more and more important in creating customer loyalty with today's fickle customers," says Bob Smith, senior project director for Maritz Marketing Research. "And mystery shopping has just recently undergone a major image revitalization."

Maritz has added a new wrinkle to mystery shopping with a product it calls Virtual Customers, an integral part of the Texaco's Building Tomorrow Together program. "To create this new product, we have integrated our mystery shopping capabilities with performance improvement programs, using the findings to amplify and expand on other customer satisfaction research by implementing a certification process of all our mystery shoppers and by upgrading our computer management strategy to provide faster, more consistent tracking and reporting," Smith says.

Each shopper must be certified before they begin work as a Virtual Customer. There are three levels of certification. First-level customers complete a process that demonstrates their ability to handle the responsibilities and skills necessary to do the job well. They then receive job-specific training including periodic updates, bringing them to second-level status. Third-level individuals have completed training specific to an industry or company. Maritz keeps this skill-level and demographic information on each Virtual Customer in a nationwide database along with his or her past shopping performance.

Human element

"Mystery shopping is not an exact science," says Smith. "But it does add a unique human element to a research project because employees are evaluated in real life service situations." Through these evaluations, company management gets an accurate snapshot of how individual locations are handling customers and meeting service specifications. For instance, in the Texaco program, mystery shoppers are asked "Are squeegees available in the self-service bays?" and "Were you greeted with a smile and in a friendly manner by an attendant or the cashier?"

"These questions alone may not seem that important to the bottom line," says Smith, "yet as we've seen with the results from the first two years of the Building Tomorrow Together program, image and customer satisfaction do have an impact on sales, and that can make any company take notice."