Tag: mystery shopper

CARY, N.C. – Elaine Buxton, CEO of Confero, Inc., (www.conferoinc.com), has announced that the national customer experience measurement firm has been named a Finalist in the 13th annual Stevie® Awards for Women in Business, and will ultimately win a Gold, Silver, or Bronze Stevie Award in the program.

The Stevie Awards for Women in Business honor women executives, entrepreneurs, employees and the companies they run – worldwide.  The Stevie Awards have been hailed as the world’s premier business awards.

Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie Award winners will be announced during a gala event at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York on Friday, November 18.  Nominated women executives and entrepreneurs from the U.S.A. and several other countries are expected to attend.   The event will be broadcast on Livestream and the pre-show from the red carpet will be streamed on the Stevie Awards’ Facebook feed.

Confero earned the finalist distinction in the Company of the Year (Business Services companies with 10 or more employees).

Confero is among more than 1,500 entries

Elaine Buxton, president, participated as a speaker at the Independent Mystery Shoppers’ Conference (IMSC), held at the Melia Hotel in Atlanta, GA on May 30th – June 1st, 2013.  The IMSC is a mystery shopper support organization working to improve the industry by providing educational information. The conference focused on ways to complete mystery shopping […]

We are constantly reminded of why our quality assurance process is so valuable to our clients. Despite ever-smarter technology, there is no replacement for an actual review of a report before it’s released to our client. Spell check can’t and won’t uncover all errors!

In 2011, we posted an article highlighting some mystery shopper funnies that Confero’s team had encountered over the years. We were surprised at all the positive feedback from those who enjoyed reading them. Given its popularity, we decided to post more humorous quotes this month.

• “There were no baggers helping the cashier so I bagged myself”.
• “I ordered tuna and the server went into a drawer for it.”

On the spot restaurant reviews, customer service remarks, and feedback on wait times. Whatever customers talk about online, managers immediately learn about customer feelings when they monitor social media. While these instantaneous comments are an important part of understanding customer opinions, the feedback is very different from customer experience services such as mystery shops and customer satisfaction surveys.

Casual online comments travel fast, and make a substantial impact on potential customer buying decisions as well as employee morale. Onsite and telephone mystery shopping results help companies reward employees for positive sales behaviors and fine tune training efforts. Customer opinions through web or mobile surveys provide honest input about employees and services. With these differences in mind, and the added complexity of random online comments, many companies wonder how all three types of research fit together.

Last year, we wrote a well-received article about 25 business types for mystery shopping programs, drawing from our years of experience with a variety of clients in many industries. From convenience stores to upscale retailers to restaurants and medical practices, mystery shopping reports go a long way toward revealing how well employees interact with customers on a daily basis.

So, how do our clients use mystery shopping? Mostly, mystery shopping is used to find out about those things customers won’t tell you in surveys or social media comments, or issues you can't discover by asking customers. If our client has a customer service delivery process or set of procedures in place for fulfilling a brand promise in front of a consumer customer, chances are the process can by mystery shopped.

We’ve compiled our top ten list of mystery shopping uses here.