» Best Secret Shopping

The best secret shopping tips can turn an ordinary hidden shopping assignment into a real breakthrough for you in terms of consumer feedback. It is true that anonymous shopping is an incredibly powerful tool to assess your business performance. It gives you a comprehensive, thorough and completely impartial view of what really happening in your business. However, as with any tool, its effectiveness lies in how you use it. Before starting out on your shopping assignment, it is important to understand what you really want out of it and what tools are available to you to achieve your goal.

Be Specific

One of the best secret shopping tips out there is to be clear and specific about what you want out of your assignment. Quality check shopping services are used for a number of different markets and reasons – for instance, hotels might hire them to find out how the average guest experience is. An NGO might hire them to make sure that establishments like orphanages are being run properly. With such a wide a range of options and tools available, it is important to approach your assignment, step by step. First of all, make sure that you concentrate on a service that has experience dealing with your kind of business. If you run a retail shop, opt for companies that work exclusively with these kinds of assignments. This will guarantee you a better feedback since everyone involved, right down to the evaluator, will know just what to do.

The best shopping services work well when you have a thorough plan of what you want. In order to create this, it is important to assess your business performance and what you perceive to be lacking. You may encounter a number of areas of concern – in this case, it is best to use a number of different shopping assignments rather than just one. Apart from problem areas, it is also important to look at aspects where you do not have enough consumer feedback. Most importantly, you need to make sure that your customer service cell operates effectively in all areas, from product returns to dealing with customer complaints.

Check Out The Service

One of the most overlooked best secret shopping hints involves researching the services themselves. The truth is that there are a number of outfits today that are either shoddily-run or are just out to scam you outright. In order to avoid these kinds of companies, it is always a good idea to ask other business associates for shopping service recommendations. When researching services, check out their client list and see how long these clients have stayed on board – a service that has steady clients that have been with them for a number of years, is most likely a good service.

There are also some good tips that are often overlooked – for instance, always make sure that the company has a physical address and phone number that is within the country. Any company that has only an email address or a post box number should be avoided. Also make sure that their website is well designed and professional – they should be able to offer you remote online access to your data at any time. Last, but definitely not least, make sure that you are comfortable working with them. After all, you will need to work as a team in order to get the feedback you are after. You should be able to ask questions and work towards outlining a winning assignment strategy to get the consumer feedback you need. 

Athens Boat Storage

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Some suggestions from Sarah Little, Secret Shopping Guru:

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Sarah

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Welcome to the secret shopping blog, our diary of the secret shopping world.

I wish I were a secret shopper today for the rental car company. It would have been an easy couple of dollars to earn. The routines went smoothly today when I dropped off my rental car. The staff members I dealt with all smiled at me and were friendly. They were all helpful. And they all protected my time by being brief and efficient.

When you deal with accompany whose routines are consistently smooth and whose people are consistently friendly, you get used to it and you don’t care to make a change. I am sure another rental car company could meet my needs. Another one might even save me a dollar or two. But it is not worth it for me to look into another company nor would I have a reason to go through the effort to switch.

When customers are pleased with you it is a hassle to switch. When customers are annoyed with you, it is easy to switch.

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Welcome to the secret shopping blog, our diary of the secret shopping and mystery shopping world.

I met with one of our secret shopping clients yesterday and was reminded of just how important we are to the people we shop and the clients we shop for. This client’s company uses our secret shopping scores in their performance and salary reviews. If an employee does not excel in his or her shops, there is no increase and no bonus.

This is probably the way it ought to be. The customer interaction is all important. If employees are not taking the customer interaction seriously and trying to give customers a great experience, then they don’t deserve recognition.

But this also puts a huge responsibility on us to make sure our evaluations are tough, but fair…and consistent. This is where our internal quality controls have to shine. There will always be room for discussion on an evaluation and there could certainly be a spread of a few points difference between the different readings of a shop. But the shops should be consistent and the scores should always be justified.

We had done a few shops for this client that fell below this requirement. One shop was scored completely incorrectly, as if the evaluator had spilled coffee on the whole project and never leaned up the mess. Of course I apologized and will make sure corrective action is taken.

Even we are guilty of loosing a little focus. Our quality has always been strong and our scoring system relevant. So it is easy to understand that we felt everything is looking good and doing well…and presto, a few poorly done shops slipped through the system.

I would tell you that you are not immune from this, either. Just because you normally do things very well, doesn’t mean you should lose focus or reduce your vigilance.

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Great Customer Service vs. Great Slow Customer Service

I was shopping the other day at a retail clothing store in our city. As I made my way through the store I accumulated a few items that I wanted to try on. When I was done looking, I headed towards the dressing rooms. (Side note: does anyone mind the dressing rooms not being separated?) A friendly gal greeted me and I set my items on the table. She gathered up my items very carefully, grabbed a door hanger and led me to my dressing room. She put the hanger on the door so that no one would walk in and then unlocked the door. I almost bumped into her at that point because we both tried to go through the door at the same time. I didn’t realize that she wanted to get into the room first so she could lay my items down very nicely on the bench. She then lets me know if I need any additional sizes to please let her know and that she would be glad to bring them to me. Wow, the whole interaction only took about 3 minutes but I was very impressed.

After I was done trying on the clothes, I picked up the clothes and headed out the door. I grabbed the door hanger and headed towards the friendly gal. She was helping one lady to her dressing room and another lady was waiting to try on some clothes also. I just wanted to drop off the things I didn’t want and take the items I did want with me. Here’s where the friendly gal got a little flustered. She still was trying to give 110% but it was really slowing down the whole process. She got everyone where they were supposed to be and she gave a little sigh of relief.

Now, I appreciate great customer service as much as the next person, but it really needs to be great customer service in a timely manner. If you had all day to try and please the customer, don’t you think that you could do a great job? As a customer, I want to be helped without too much of wait. Without compromising the friendly gals’ routine, maybe they could have had two associates working the desk so that if one was away, the other was there to provide help. Or perhaps, if she was short handed, she could have done a little less for each of us. We still would have appreciated her help and we would have not been frustrated by the wait. Whatever the solution might be, it would be great if the customer could receive the service they deserve as quickly as possible. Any time you can make your routine more efficient it will help the whole customer service process. Take some time today to think of your routine and if it could be scaled down time-wise.

Thanks,
Natalie

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Yesterday I came in to work around 10:30- a little later than usual. I just couldn’t wake up and I didn’t feel very well. So I had already begun my day with a negative outlook. I went through my routine, clocking in, checking my emails, etc. and I came across an email from our newest client.

He signed up on the 24th of October. (The last week of the month and also our busiest time.) When he signed up he wanted four of his locations shopped within the month. Although it was crunch time, I figured why not add four shops. I wanted him to be impressed anyway. So I said yes. We worked out the details, and I said I’d have them to him on Monday.

Just to fill you in, I emailed him his four shops earlier this week. I personally read over the evaluations to make sure they’d knock his socks off. I thought he’d be pleased with the quality of them. So I was expecting this man to become our biggest fan. I mean, we just whipped up four shops at the last minute and did an amazing job on the evaluations!

As I read his email I was shocked, and annoyed. Rather than singing our praises, he was mean and ugly with me. He said that he wanted eleven shops for October, and he wanted the rest of them immediately. (“Uuhh, can you believe this guy?” After we went so far out of our way….) I replied and told him exactly what I thought about his attitude…and then I deleted it. I then wrote the “I’m sorry there was a misunderstanding…” letter. I did paste the phrase from his email in which he asked for only the four shops. But, never the less, I had to be the proverbial ‘bigger person’.

After I sent the apology email, he called me! Just to say that he was clear about what he wanted the first time. I was pretty much speechless at this point. So I interrupted him and told him we’d be happy to do the additional shops that weren’t done last month within this week. (In my mind I was thinking, “After all, I’d love to bill for 7 more shops.”) Anyway, all I can say about him is that he likes to have the last word, and he must be in the right at all times.

I’m not sure if I would be as annoyed with this guy if I hadn’t started out my day on the wrong foot. In fact, I believe he must have also started his day the exact same way. But at the end of it all, I do want him to be happy with his services and he’d be a great person to have in our fan club. So hopefully he’ll see what a great job we do.

We are not the only people who have challenging customers, have misunderstandings with our customers or who catch themselves becoming annoyed when they think they are “right”. It is of course ironic that the secret shopping professionals also have to put themselves in check sometimes.

The fact is that once you wow a customer that you have share some misunderstanding or another with, you can build a great long term relationship.

Sarah

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