We train shoppers and evaluators, too

Welcome to our secret shopping and mystery shopping blog, where we share our experience with you.

PhoneSmart’s Secret Shopper and Evaluator Training Process

In addition to the training we sell to our Secret Shopping clients, we have also created a training packet for our Secret Shoppers and Evaluators.

At first, our training for the Shoppers was very basic. We gave a few hints and tips to avoid going undetected. We suggested that they forget everything they know about storage and think about what a layman would ask when shopping for storage. In addition to this, we asked them to remember some of the things they’d heard from shoppers when taking calls in the Call Center. It was easy for everyone to remember their favorite call or the most wacky request or item that was going into the storage unit. They were encouraged to have fun and develop their characters as much as they thought would be necessary.

Of course, we had some shoppers that were nervous about “pretending” and not telling “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” But once they completed their first few shops and found how easy going the managers were, they quickly learned that it’s a piece of cake!

It wasn’t until several months into our Secret Shopping project, that we discovered that even though our shoppers were uniformed when it came to storage, they were asking all the right questions and making the manager’s job very easy. I quickly put together a more detailed training book for the Shoppers instructing them on what questions were and were not appropriate. Basically, I incorporated the Evaluator training into the Shopper training so they would know how not to interfere with the manager getting a good score on their evaluation. Our goal was and is to be as neutral as possible and to provide the most accurate test of their sales skills as possible.

As for the Evaluators, their training has been very detailed and thorough from the very beginning. When I started in the Secret Shopping department, our standards were very high – for our Shoppers/Evaluators and for the managers that we shopped. To make sure that we consistently meet those standards, we continue to review our new Evaluator’s work until we feel it’s of the quality our clients deserve and have come to expect. For this reason, it’s been difficult to find and retain good evaluators.

When I began doing the Secret Shops, they were hand-written. This presented some challenges that we didn’t expect. Not only did we have to find and train Evaluators, they also had to have nice hand-writing. Unfortunately, this eliminated several potentially good Evaluators. Once we started getting more and more clients, it became more and more difficult to continue doing the evaluations by hand. After several tries, we figured the easiest way to do the evaluations online that could be taught to everyone who wasn’t so familiar with the program. Doing the evaluations online truly has saved an enormous amount of time and has opened the door to several opportunities with people we would not have normally been able to use as an Evaluator.

Our evaluation form is very simple and easy to use so once they got the hang of using the computer to complete the evaluations, our Evaluators were off to a great start.

It’s amazing how much actually goes into calling someone, then rating how well they did.
Laura

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

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