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Welcome to the secret shopping blog, where we try to give you some insight into the world of mystery shopping and sercret shopping.
Last year I went to the beach for a few days with my kids. They were little and my wife and I wanted to get them life jackets to wear when playing in the surf. We went to a world famous surf supply shop figuring they must have some safety floatation vests for little kids. Doesn’t that make senses?

The people at the information desk didn’t really know what I was asking them about and told us to look in one place and then in the kids section if that didn’t work and then across the street at the water sports shop they owned, too, it that didn’t work. We couldn’t find anything similar in the first place we were sent to and then asked in the kids shop. We were first told to go back to where we first looked. When we said there was nothing there for us, the department worker said, “Try Wal-Mart.”

If I were the secret shopper, this guy would have had his behind handed to him on his evaluation score and been suspended without pay. Why don’t they know how to help people? Why can’t they know their own store? WHY WOULD THEY EVEN THINK OF SENDING US ELSEWHERE?

We were flabergasted and frustrated. On the way out of the store, we thought we’d ask one more person. It was the lady stocking shelves. She probably knew more about the store than anyone, we thought. She knew exactly what we needed and knew for sure it was at the water sports shop. Once we got there, everything went great. But jiminy cricket, we wwere told to try Walmart. What kind of crazy stuff like this happens in your business? How do you strive to prevent it? And guess what? I am not writing about the guy at the water sports shop who did his job well. I am writing about the guy who told us to go elsewhere.

bye for now, Tron

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Welcome to the secret shopping blog, where we share our experinces in the mystery shopping industry and secret shopping trends. We can help you with your secret shopping business if you are already in the “Biz”, or give you insights into how the mystery shopping professional works if you are looking to hire or become a secret shopper.

Here is a piece the PhoneSmart director Tron Jordheim wrote that he also based a training seminar on. You may find that there are some good tips for creating a sales and customer service culture that will do great when you get secret shopped.

Create a culture, set up hoops, and watch candidates excel!
By Tron Jordheim
Most of us agree it is better to have sales-savvy staff than not. Our business requires intense customer interaction. The person at the front desk wearing your logo shirt is the reason people choose to store with you or your competitor. When a tenant has a problem, it is your staff person’s ability to handle it that makes the difference.
So how do you attract sales-savvy people? You have to build the culture first. Every workplace has its own feel and unspoken understandings—this is your culture. It revolves around language; stories, myths and legends; rituals; and unwritten rules. When your culture encourages sales and the development of selling skills, you have created a workplace where sales-savvy people are comfortable and can excel.
Language
Start speaking the language of sales. Teach employees how to use qualifying questions, alternate-choice closes, concerns and assurances, assumptive statements, closing percentages and missed opportunities. Learn the keywords and code words that help your staff keep “sales” at the front of their minds.
Stories, Myths and Legends
Share stories and myths about selling with your staff. For example, there is a great story about a young kid straight out of high school who went to work for a department store that sold everything you could imagine. At the end of his first day, the store owner asked him how many customers he had helped. He was shocked and dismayed to hear the hire had only helped one customer and asked him to explain.
The kid explained he had offered a customer a fishing hook, only to find the man had no rod, reel and or tackle. After he helped the customer pick out that gear, he discovered the man had no fishing boots or outdoor clothes, so he helped him choose the right boots, pants, jacket and hat. Then he realized the customer had no boat, so he helped him select a boat and appropriate trailer. When the man mentioned he would have trouble hauling the boat with his Volkswagen, the young sales clerk took him to the truck department and helped him choose a pickup truck with a towing package and CD/DVD player.
Finally, at 4:45 p.m., the customer who had been with the young salesman since 10:30 that morning had everything he could possibly need for a weekend of fishing. The owner of the store was amazed. He asked, “You sold all this merchandise to a man who came in to buy a fishing hook?” The kid replied, “Well, actually, I started the day in the pharmacy, and the customer asked me where to find the band-aids. While I was helping him, I happened to say, ‘Looks like a good weekend to go fishing.’”
There are all kinds of fun stories about salespeople. There are some great cartoons, too. Have you ever seen the “Far Side” cartoon featuring the King of Salesmen? He is waving good-bye from a boat as he pulls away from a shore-side Eskimo village. The Eskimos are standing proudly by their new refrigerators and waving back. You can tell their fondness for the salesman in the sad expressions on their faces.
Then there are sales myths, like the “Rule of Thirds,” which breaks customers into three distinct categories:
• One third of customers will rent from you, as long as you don’t chase them off, because they already like your location or know someone who has rented from you. Your job is simply to not talk them out of the sale.
• Another third of customers will not rent from you, either because you can’t meet their current needs or their needs are too far in the future. If you are nice to these folks, they might remember you when it is time to rent.
• The final third could go either way. These are the people with whom you need to use your best sales and listening skills.
Finally, talk with employees about legends of great sales feats accomplished by members of your business. For example, tell them about the time one of your managers had a record rental day. Talk about the funny ways staff has asked for the rental and gotten it. At my company, we still talk about the day one of our sales reps, Dana, reserved seven 10-by-20s for one caller, and we still try to beat Paula’s eight-hour record of 23 credit-card reservations.
Rituals
You can also establish business rituals for your staff. These might include the manner in which you make notes on your call logs, the way you stand up to greet customers who walk through your door, the way you turn the lease toward new tenants so they can see where to initial and sign. Look at the things you do during your selling routine. Use consistency to allow some of these actions to become rituals.
Unwritten Rules
Then there are unwritten rules. For example, consider the rule that you should never end a rental inquiry without asking which day the person would like to move in; or the rule that says there’s no eating at the front counter; or the rule that says you should look everyone in the eye when you greet them. You probably have many such guidelines that work in selling your facility to new tenants and re-selling it to current ones. They may not be typed in the policies and procedures manual, but you encourage employees to follow them nonetheless. Let employees know what those rules are so they can use them.
Attracting the Sales-Savvy
Now that you have created a selling culture, you need to attract people who are sales-savvy. How do you get the right people to inquire about your positions? What do you call those positions? Do you look for managers, sales assistants, marketing reps or retail-sales reps? Think about this before advertising or promoting an opening. You will generally get what you ask for in an ad.
Start screening candidates with some qualifying hoops. The first a potential new hire jumps through is the recorded audition. When a candidate calls your “employment hotline,” he is invited to talk about himself and his experience on a voicemail message. Listen to all the messages and only contact the people who sound good on the phone, use visuals in their stories and sell themselves well. The impression employees make on the phone is essential to getting rentals. Why not hire only people with a great phone presentation?
If a potential hire passes the recorded audition, the next step is the phone interview and mystery shop. If you like the way the person deals with you and sells himself during the phone interview, move on to the shopping phase. Wait a day or so, call his place of work, and interact with him as if you are a prospective or current customer of that business. How he treats you in this situation will tell you a lot. Did your potential hire ask for your business, try to fix your problem, and attempt to cross-or up-sell?
Testing, 1,2,3
Next is the personal interview. For this, you will need to create a test that will weed out the wrong people for the job. It can be frustrating when a person interviews well, then turns out to be a bad fit for the position. I once hired someone with a good resume and appropriate work history who interviewed very well. When the other team members learned about the hire, they asked if I was nuts. Apparently, he had been rude and even hostile to three or four people while waiting in the break room for his interview. Enter the birth of “The Break-Room Test.”
Now when I conduct personal interviews, I intentionally leave the candidate waiting in the break room for five or 10 minutes before I meet him. I have several team members interact with him during that time and gauge his reactions. If the prospect does not offer natural, friendly re

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What is the PhoneSmart?

PhoneSmart is a wholly owned subsidiary of StorageMart. StorageMart is a company with assets of 300 million dollars that currently operates 46 storage facilities. The owners of StorageMart, the Burnam family, formerly operated Storage Trust. One of the larger storage businesses in the country, Storage Trust contracted with a third party call center to handle its incoming calls and received many thousands of calls a month. PhoneSmart was created based on the experiences and successes at Storage Trust.

PhoneSmart Call center is a solution for two of the most perplexing problems in the self-storage industry.

1. Facility managers can’t answer all the phone calls their facilities receive. Managers are often out on the site showing units or doing facility maintenance. When they are in the office, they may be walking a new tenant through a lease, visiting with a current tenant or making past-due calls. Mangers can miss calls; and potential renters call before and after hours, too. Do you know how many calls your stores miss? It might be a painful answer.

2. One of the primary ways people find out about a storage facility is through the yellow pages. I don’t have to tell you how large a chunk of revenue a facility’s yellow page advertising eats up. It is enormous. What does it actually cost to get someone to call your facility? A lot. If your manager can’t get to the phone for one reason or another, is the caller going to call back… or move on to the next ad in the yellow pages? How much money do facility owners spend to help their competitors fill units? Even if you get a lot of your renters from your location, most people call first before coming in to your stores.

At PhoneSmart, we turn those missed calls into profit. PhoneSmart is a roll-over call center. Any time the manager can’t get to the phone, or is already talking on the phone, the new caller is forwarded on to us.

We have made a huge investment in the latest telephone technology. Our technology enables us to separate the people calling about renting a unit from the people calling to talk to the manager about issues other than a new rental. If the person wants the manager, that call is forwarded to the manager’s individual voicemail box. The manager can retrieve the message when things calm down at the store and then return the call.

Our system also determines the exact facility the caller had dialed and brings the current information for that facility up on the computer screen in front of the sales person answering the phone at PhoneSmart.

We can then walk the caller through a consultative sales process. The caller makes a reservation confirmed with a major credit card, which is forwarded to the store manager. If the caller does not have a credit card or is unsure of a move in date, the information is automatically faxed or emailed to the manager for timely follow-up. We have developed several excellent ways to drive callers to your store. We can help you integrate systems and procedures that will convert as many of our leads into rentals as you possibly can.

PhoneSmart is not an answering service. PhoneSmart has many advantages over an answering service type or customer service type call center. Because we focus on the rental calls, we can reduce the total cost of call center services to our clients. Forwarding tenant calls to the manager means the manager can deal directly with people she or he is on a first name basis with. When we do talk to your current renters, we can give them a great customer service experience, by answering basic questions for them or referring them on to the store manager.

Because we ask for a bonus from our clients when we write a credit card confirmed reservation, our motivation is to maximize every call. It also means we can offer performance incentives to our reps. Other call centers hire lower wage “operators” or “customer service reps”. We hire sales people and invest in their training. Therefore, we not only give a professional presentation of your facility, we also sell it. Our job is not to clear calls, but to send people to your store. The credit card confirmed reservation is a great way to get people to go to your facility.

Another benefit of dealing with PhoneSmart, is knowing we are a part of a successful storage business. We know about self-storage. We have also made the commitment to be a leader in call center technologies. Because of our commitment to technology solutions, we have an experienced IT expert on staff .

If we can create just one new rental a month that a facility otherwise would have missed, our service pays for itself in almost every instance.

What results can you expect from us?

PhoneSmart has been taking calls since December of 2000.

StorageMart compared total occupancy rates in June of 2000 for their established, mature stores with total occupancy rates for these stores in June of 2001. There was a 7 percent increase. The only operational difference was PhoneSmart. I’m not sure we can claim all seven points, but we were certainly responsible for several of them.

In 2002, PhoneSmart was credited with 16% of total rentals for 34 StorageMart stores, totaling over 2,500 rentals. If we can talk to people about your site, we can help you rent units.

PhoneSmart talked to over 100,000 self-storage callers in 2002 for all of its 40 plus client companies. That adds up to a lot of experience, experience you can put to work for your company.

PhoneSmart sent its 200,000th lead/reservation in April of 2005. Our experience in turning inquiries into rentals is second to none.

PhoneSmart also offers a secret shopping service to help you make sure your phones are being answered correctly at your property. We have recently added a sales lead follow-up service to help you make sure you are renting to as many of the leads we create as you can. And our sales training material will help your staff sell as well as we do.

PhoneSmart is also actively preparing for the future. We have a redundant phone center that is located on the other side of town on a different spoke of the phone and utility grid, so that in the event of service disruptions or disasters, we can continue to provide great service to our clients through our back-up center. We continue to develop our technologies to be able to offer superior service for years to come.

We have been providing secret shopping services to clients for 3 years. Some use us just for monitoring. Some use us for moving their sales and customer service programs forward. We are mystery shopping professionals who know how to mystery shop. We give your staff a chance to shine and give you a chance to make some real improvements. This secret shopping blog is one way to help people learn more about the secret shopping business.

To find out more about PhoneSmart and how it can help you profit from your missed calls, email Tron Jordheim, the PhoneSmart director at tron@phone-smart.net or call 1-866-639-1715. Forgive us if you are put into voicemail, we may be busy writing a credit card confirmed reservation for one of our forty plus clients. Or you can find us at www.phone-smart.info .

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You’ve heard it said about a sales person. “He can sell ice to Eskimos”. Usually we take this to mean the sales person was so good at persuasion and so hypnotically dazzling that he could sell people something they don’t need. There is the suggestion that the sales person cheated the Eskimos because they have plenty of free ice in a good winter. We usually mean this quote as an insult and a compliment at the same time. If your secret shopping evaluation said “Sells ice to Eskimos.” you might not be sure how to take it.

In today’s secret shopping blog, I’d like to take a different look at this saying. If you were trying to build a business selling a product or service, wouldn’t you want customers that knew the value of what they were buying? Wouldn’t you seek out the people who knew the most about your business and try to find a way to satisfy their requirements? Wouldn’t those people become your biggest users and biggest fans if you served them well? Wouldn’t your sales techniques revolve around what those people in the know taught you?

One would think that Eskimos know a lot about ice. I would bet their languages have many ways of describing ice. Some live in ice houses part of the year, hunt on ice during hunting season, kayak around ice flows and put ice cubes in their Coca Cola. If you knew about the different uses they had for ice and how ice needs to be for each of their uses, you could build a very nice business selling ice to Eskimos. If you could get the right consistency and coldness of pre-cut blocks, shaped especially for walls, ceilings and tunnels, you could sell pre-cut igloos to Eskimo families who are too busy to select and cut their own ice blocks. Eskimos have busy, demanding modern lives that don’t always leave them enough time to savor the traditional enjoyments. Buying prefab igloo ice would allow them more time to enjoy the great outdoors. Your mystery shoppers will need to be aware of how yor retail people approach iglooe ice.

If you knew the kind of ice that was required to keep seals preserved for processing after a hunt, you might be able to sell “Hunter Ice” as well. With the changes global warming is bringing to the arctic, the right kind of ice may not be available to hunters at the times they need it. I can only imagine the disappointment in taking a big seal for your family only to have it spoil before you can get it home and processed.

There are probably kayak races that are held each year in areas that used to have consistent ice flows. I can imagine that some kayakers would be very disappointed to run a race with no ice flow obstacles. If a company could overcome the transportation issues, it could probably sell a lot of ice to the big races with big purses to attract the best competitors and the best sponsors. A “Kayak Ice” line might not sell to many events, but those transactions would generate a lot of revenue for the ice company and the race organizers.

Certainly your ice company would want the exclusive in the concession booths that offered cold soft drinks to the audience. Knowing that the same company that can provide the best quality “Igloo Ice”, “Hunter Ice” and “Kayak Ice” is putting its best “Drinking Ice” in the soft drink machines would allow the concession stands to charge a little more per cup and they’d probably sell more drinks.

What about selling refrigerators to Eskimos. Have any of you seen the Larsen “Far Side” cartoon of the sales man floating away on his boat, waving good-bye to the Eskimos who are standing beside their new refrigerators? What do you think when you see the cartoon? Do you think, “Wow that guy must be some kind of B.S. artist.”? Do you think, “Those Eskimos are suckers.”? Maybe there is a lot more going on there. If you look at the expressions on the characters faces, you see that they are going to miss each other.

Just because it is cold in the arctic, doesn’t mean the temperature is always right for all the things you want to chill. Have you ever seen what happens to a nice head of lettuce if it is kept too cold? Or what happens to apples if your humidity levels are off? What about the seal meat from the hunt? Keep your game refrigerated at the wrong temperature and your family might go hungry. Many newer refrigerators have cool amenities like crushed or cubed ice from the door and filtered drinking water from the door. If the company that provided the best ice for outdoor use, also sold its own brand of refrigerators with crushed and cubed ice available with a touch of your finger, it could develop brand loyalty that would create years of profitable growth and many happy customers.

If your business was ice or refrigerators, would the Eskimos do business with you? Do you know enough about what your customers need and like? When someone who knows a little something about storage looks at your place, do they say, “Yes, this is good.”? Try thinking of yourself as the ice sales person who has just been awarded all the lands north of the Artic Circle as your new sales territory. Do you think you could develop a good business?

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How many tries does it take to get through to the person you want to secret shop on the phone? It may take several tries. You need to pick your schedule carefully and change your voice if you have to call back several times to catch someone. You might also need a good excuse to ask for that person specifically. If you say, “My friend told me to call”, the subject might easily say, “what is his name.” Then you are stuck. Secret shoppers always have to try to anticipate the questions they are asked so you have a good alibi. Then get down to asking the questions you have to to make the evaluation. It takes some persistence and some good scheduling habits of your own to track down all the people you need to without trying too many times.
Bye for now, Tron

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How many different kinds of business can benefit from secret shopping their people? Well all of them of course. Every business has to be sold well. Every business has customers who need to feel well taken care of. Even secret shopping companies need to secret shop their staff. How can you monitor compliance to policy, strategy and tactic if you don’t know who is saying and doing what? How can you move your sales and customer service levels higher if there is no measuring of standards and no way to raise standards? Writing a secret shopping blob or a mystery shopping blog is an interesting way to consider the details and the big issues involved in making a mystery shopping or secret shopping program work. If you are not shopping your employees, you should start finding a way to get it done.

Bye for now, Tron

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Don’t get busted when the person you are shopping asks your name. This is one of the funnier ways to raise suspicion in your shopping subject. Subject says, “What is your name?” You say, “Ah” before blurting out something. Whatever your pretend name is going to be, you have to practice it a few times to make sure it flows smoothly when asked. Companies that use secret shoppers have employees who are always wondering if the next person they talk to is a shopper. This is not all bad, if the employees are doing this to try to provide the best experience possible to each customer and to get good shopping scores. If employees are looking for the secret shopper to duck their shop, then it is a bad thing. So don’t blow your cover when they ask your name.

Bye for now, Tron

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How do you develop a profile that flies when you are secret shopping a business. Take a few minutes and create a persona. This is a little like playing make-believe. Ever do that as a kid? It is fun. Have a few answers available when the people you are shopping make conversation. Have a good scenario set up sp that the people you are shopping can have a chance to “show their stuff”. You want to give every opportunity to your subjects to do well. It is a little like a sting operation. Only you are trying to give the people you are setting up an opportunity to do good, rather than to do bad. You are like a secret agent. It is a fun pretend game to play. I would suggest going so far as creating a name, address and phone number, so you won’t get stumped. Have some fun with it. You might be surprised at what you find.
Bye for now, Tron.

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