Tag: mystery shopping

Confero is excited to introduce guest blogger, Cathy Stucker. Cathy is the author of The Mystery Shopper’s Manual, the best selling guide to being a successful professional mystery shopper and blogs about the mystery shopping industry on her blog, The Mystery Shopper's Manual.  Confero President, Elaine Buxton first met Cathy several years ago during a Gold Shopper Certification seminar held by the MSPA when Cathy was working as a trainer for the Gold Certification program.    

 by Cathy Stucker, MysteryShoppersManual.com

You just got back from shopping three locations of the same client. Each assignment used the same scenario, and they all went pretty much the same way. The temptation is to write the comments and narrative for the first shop, then copy and paste your words into the other two reports. A few changes of names and other details and you’re done, right?

Wrong! Although recycling is a good thing, recycling comments and narratives in your mystery shop reports is not. Not only do some shoppers do this when they shop multiple locations of a company in the same day, they may copy and paste comments from shops done for the same client in previous months, or even shops done for competing businesses in the same industry. I even heard about one shopper who copied and pasted comments from the sample report provided by the mystery shopping company.

Gathering competitive business intelligence is an important step in retaining and gaining new customers. To help businesses get the information they need, Confero often executes competitor studies on a large scale and over a considerable length of time. However, there are ways for individual stores to conduct competitive analysis locally and effectively. One way is to use your existing employees as mystery shoppers. Here are simple steps to put a competitor evaluation plan into action:

About a year has passed since I commented on the ever present phrase, “No problem.” We have all heard the phrase, whether it is after thanking a server for bringing our drinks, or thanking a teller for processing our transaction. In any situation where the phrase is used, it continues to shed a negative tone on what could be an opportunity to wow the customer at the end of an interaction. So, I am not surprised that the number of times that I have heard “no problem” over the past year has not diminished my dislike of it!

Many companies spend significant effort in evaluating, selecting and preparing for a mystery shop program. They invest this effort because they know that the information they gain can be used to improve company performance and top the competition.

We are preparing to celebrate Confero’s 25th year in business in 2011. Naturally, I have started to look back on our years in business. I’m often asked how we got started in the mystery shopping business. Here’s my favorite “how it all started” story. It’s the story of how our local firm became national, quickly, by doing small things right.