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Welcome to our Secret Shopping Blog.

We’ve come a long way since our Secret Shopping business began. Years ago it was done by one person out of her home on an analog phone with a cassette recorder attached to it. Talk about “old school”. Our secret shops were done by Sarah who now works in our Administration Department. She’d just had a baby and always had an excuse to cut the call short if she needed to. One day, many boxes and pieces of equipment arrived at Sarah’s house from Radio Shack. It was kind of like a set of LEGO’s that Sarah had to figure out how to put together without the instruction booklet.

This was the process:

1. There were 10,863 wires and cables and connections that had to be hooked up to her phone. It was such a mess that if she hadn’t done it for a little while, it would take 15 minutes to figure it out before she could even start a shop.
2. She also had to figure out which wires needed to be connected to her cassette tape recorder. This usually took another 10 to 15 minutes.
3. Sarah located a cassette tape – made sure it was all the way rewound – put it into her recorder and was ready to begin.
4. Many times the greeting would be cut off because after pushing the record button, it would take a second for the tape to begin rolling. If the quality of the shop wasn’t so good, Sarah would rewind over what she’d recorded and begin again, this time pressing record a little earlier.
5. When all 80 shops were done, Sarah would rewind the tape again and get it ready to evaluate.

Speaking of evaluations, the crude version of our now in-depth eval form took all of about 5 minutes to complete. Now they take between 10 and 15 minutes depending on the length of the call. The form had few questions compared to our current version and was completed by hand. When Sarah finished her shops and evaluations, she would drop off all the cassette tapes and the handwritten evals to be sent to our 5 clients.

Today we complete over 200 shops a month and we’ve refined our process of doing secret shops. We no longer use cassette tapes as the calls are recorded and put into a special folder in our computer network. From there, we can edit them, rearrange them and cut them on to a CD. Nowadays, we typically email many of our clients’ shops by converting them to an MP3.
The evaluations have also come a long way. We’re no longer completing them by hand. We mark everything on the computer and those are emailed as well. The forms are much more detailed and are based on a point system that is a good indicator of where the problem areas might lie and definitely where their strengths are. We also put together reports every quarter that show the progress or lack thereof for the year. All this is sent via the information super-highway. No more tape recorders or 10,863 wires to connect to anything.
We’ve come a very long way in a few years. We’ll keep you up to date about how the next 3 years – or 3 months for that matter – changes how we handle our business.

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.