Working With Mark Cuban to Re-Open Texas Safely

The pandemic has been overwhelming and disruptive to thousands of businesses and we are far from returning to some sort of normalcy. Many impacted including the retail, food service and hospitality industries are struggling to survive. 

Businesses are trying to keep up with state and local government safety guidelines and restrictions like stay-at-home orders, travel, limited gatherings and other operational rules. It can all be very confusing, especially for businesses that operate in multiple states. With no cohesive plan, businesses are forced to pivot at any given moment all while trying to keep customers and employees safe. 

That means restaurants and retail organizations must figure out how to operate in a way that minimizes risk and disruption to the customer experience, but makes safety and compliance paramount.

3 Steps To A Successful Safety Audit Program

At Shiftsmart, we’ve worked with dozens of restaurants and retailers to accomplish exactly that. In our experience, the companies that have succeeded have followed three distinct steps.

1. Understand the Rules. To ensure compliance, you first need to be very clear on what you’re complying with. Common COVID-related regulations include:

• Corporate standards: Most big companies have put together detailed standards for reopening. These typically include the basics, such as rules around employee mask wearing, social distancing, and hand washing and sanitizing, but may also dictate the specifics around particular customer touchpoints. 
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• Government policies: These range from recommendations, such as the CDC’s, to city- or state-level rules and restrictions. They may define hours of operation, what you can sell when, occupancy limits, and more. 

These rules are your baseline: what you absolutely must do in order to serve customers safely and without the risk of fines -- or worse -- for non-compliance.

2. Establish your bar. While these regulations determine WHAT needs to happen to operate safely, they don’t specify HOW. 

‍How you go about following them, while optimizing the customer experience, differentiates the organizations that survive (or even thrive) during COVID from the ones that don’t.

What does it mean to “establish your bar”? It involves identifying each touchpoint in your customer experience, examining how you can evolve it to maximize both safety and CX, then codifying all of those touchpoints into a repeatable policy and program. 

The goal of your program: Establish a bar that supports the experience you want your customers to have. It should be thorough and visible, so that they can easily see the steps that you’re taking to ensure their safety, but with as little disruption as possible. 

What does that look like in practice? One of our customers, a leading hotel brand with more than 950 locations worldwide, put together a 15-point “report card” that we used to evaluate more than 700 of their properties in 50+ countries in 2020. 

Defining the parameters of your experience allows you to make it consistent across locations -- which is hugely important for brand equity and loyalty -- as well as make it quantifiable. Which leads us to… 

‍3. Measure the execution. For organizations with numerous locations, this is where it can get tricky. Employees at a local level must be responsible for implementing the standards that you defined. It’s likely impossible, however, to visit every location in a reasonable amount of time to evaluate adherence. 

To truly ensure compliance with regulations and brand standards, restaurants and retailers need a way to manage implementation across all properties that are not self-reported and provide real-time data that they can measure against and react to. 

This is where business audits (a.k.a. mystery shopping programs) come in. Choose a cadence, whether daily, weekly, or monthly, to evaluate your locations. Use your “bar” from step two to put together your report card. Then send in the mystery shoppers and see how each location performs. 

‍Mark Cuban Selects Shiftsmart To Audit Dallas Reopening
‍Dallas businesses were slow to open at first, with just a 36% reopen rate in the first week of May. Openings grew steadily, however, over the next few months, topping out with a 75% reopen rate by the end of June.

Consumers appeared ready to return to restaurants and retail locations as well. According to Google’s Mobility Report, visits to retail and recreation locations in Dallas were down as much as -55% in April when compared to a pre-COVID baseline. With businesses open, Dallas consumer visits to retail and recreation were only down -21% on June 26th.

Unfortunately, the Shiftsmart safety audit revealed that businesses weren’t as ready as their customers to operate during the COVID era. As consumers started visiting newly reopened businesses, Shiftsmart performed in-person audits to understand if businesses were following protocols.

For one client, the Shiftsmart safety audit program enabled the organization to:

• Learn within 24 hours if there was a failure on employee mask compliance
• Receive updates every 24 about overall COVID-compliance
• Perform 700 audits across 50+ countries in the first two months of COVID regulations

In the first week of May, ~1/3 of businesses were less than 50% compliant with mandatory protocols. As many businesses reopened, the level of noncompliance remained, with 32% of businesses less than 50% compliant with mandatory protocols at the end of June.

Further, while reopening rates and consumer activity grew and compliance rates remained generally flat, COVID cases skyrocketed. It became clear that businesses were not or could not comply with the reopening protocols, and that cases were rising as a result.

Mark Cuban and others used this data and more to bring attention to the challenges and implications of reopening. With the stark data, Texas moved to close bars and limit restaurant capacity to 50%.

The Shiftsmart Safety Audit Program enables any organization to:

• Quickly engage potential auditors in a rigorous screening process followed by comprehensive virtual training.
• Quickly execute a safety audit program
• Learn within 24 hours if employees are non-compliant
• Quickly remediate with real-time data for immediate action and issue resolution
• Respond to dynamic circumstances in real time with a flexible program
• Boost customer satisfaction and loyalty with a safe, consistent guest experience
• Protect the brand by mitigating issues before they escalated to government authorities or created PR challenges

 Re-Open Your Brick & Mortar Locations Safely
‍Shiftsmart enables scalable quality management programs that can be deployed at retailers, restaurants, hotels, and on-site services providers of any type to measure compliance with COVID-19 safety protocols.

Our programs enable the world’s largest brands and government agencies to collect location-level data, deploy training and break-fix intervention to close operational gaps, and perform ongoing quality management data to ensure your customers and guests are receiving a safe experience at every location.

 Read the datasheet or get in touch to learn more about how Shiftsmart Safety Audit Program can benefit you.