Work as a Secret Shopper!
Successful businesses who want to stay that way need to have a finger on the pulse of their customers. Offering quality products at a fair price is only part of the equation; it is at least equally important to provide exemplary customer service as well.
If you are a business owner, is there a way to tell how well your employees are interacting with your customers? Yes, there is!
What is Secret Shopping?
A secret shopper, also known as a mystery shopper, is someone who is hired to visit a business to evaluate different aspects of how it is being run. A mystery shopper can be asked to evaluate any or all of the following during a visit:
- Customer Service Practices
- Merchandising
- Operations
- Product Selection and Quality
Having a secret shopper visit your business and provide a report about their experiences is a way to find out what your employees are doing well and to discover gaps in their training or knowledge. This information can be used to improve training procedures and make other necessary changes to your policies.
A Secret Shopper by Any Other Name…
There are a number of terms used to describe these kinds of services, including:
- Anonymous Audits
- Employee Evaluations
- Performance Audits
- Telephone Checks
- Virtual Customers
How the Process Works
A person is given an assignment to visit a particular business and make detailed observations about their experience. The secret shopper will be provided with detailed instructions in advance and will be making careful notes afterward of their overall impressions and experience with the business in question.
Once the client company receives the secret shopper’s report, owners and managers have a much better handle on which employees are already offering stellar customer service and which ones need some help to either come up to company standards or to improve their overall performance.
Companies who are interested in using mystery shoppers to evaluate employee performance are generally advised to tell their employees that they will be doing so in advance.
That way, the mystery shopping experience can be framed as a tool to help improve training and customer service policies, as opposed to a witch hunt to weed out employees who are not up to snuff.
If the idea of using mystery shoppers is handled in an upfront manner, employees (who don’t know who the mystery shoppers are or when they will visit) can focus on doing their job instead of trying to improve their performance only during times when they know a visit is imminent.
MysteryShopperJobFinder will guide you through the whole process of finding legitimate mystery shopping and market research opportunities. From the first tap of the keys for an Internet search to all of the things you should do while on the job, this is the most important stop on your journey.