Shopping Nightmares

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If you are not convinced secret shopping is right for your business then you better read the following scenarios. Though fictional, these shopping stories are based on real-life situations. These situations happen to shoppers everyday. Maybe you have experienced a similar experience. Maybe you have experienced worse. So after you read these you should see the importance for secret shopping. If you own a business or are the property manager of one, it may be time to shake things up a bit like an 8.0 earthquake.

Scenario number 1: After shopping around on the internet you finally make a decision on a self storage company. But you want to see the storage property in person first before you make a commitment. When you walk into the office, the clerk behind the counter is chatting up a storm with another clerk about last nights episode involving a toy mouse and an accordion player. As you approach the counter the clerk makes eye contact with you but continues to talk about the bizarre story.

It is obvious that this self storage company does not use secret shopping as a training method. If they did use secret shopping these employees would have been more attentive to you, the customer. Secret shopping teaches all types of clerks and salespeople that the customer is the most important part of the company, not the climax of a weird story. Secret shoppers have their own stories about their secret shopping experiences which are much more interesting. Treatment like this will cause many people to walk out and the self storage company will lose valuable business. It is likely that a customer treated like this will tell other people to rent storage somewhere else, but unlikely that he will tell the property manager about the experience. So the property manager will never know about the situation. However, secret shopping will reveal everything to the property manager and he can take action from there.

Scenario number 2: It was a close call. You almost forgot your mothers birthday again so you resort to a popular online shopping website and request overnight shipping. The next day as you wait eagerly for your package you finally decide it is not coming when nothing is on TV besides infomercials. The tracking number cannot locate your order, so with no other options you are forced to pick up an animal-like potted plant at a local convenience store. Your package mysteriously shows up on your door step a few days later. You notice the return address is from the company but the contents of the box, a thesaurus and a stake knife, are not what you ordered.

Not many people know this but online shopping is not immune to secret shopping. If you were a secret shopper who experienced this poor service you would give the website a poor secret shopping grade. Secret shoppers evaluate a shopping websites ease of use, delivery time, and delivery accuracy. Though this scenario does not mention the ease of use, this online company drastically failed in the other two parts of the test. If this company used secret shopping as a training strategy, the employees would have been a lot more careful when shipping the order. Now it is unlikely that this customer will shop at this online business ever again. Secret shopping can catch flaws before customers experience them.

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StorageMart 67th St & I- 35 Merriam, KS 66203

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