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Mystery Shopping Is a Win-Win for You and Local Businesses

Do you have strong opinions about customer service? Have a discerning taste for quality? Believe in supporting local business? Of course you do. But did you know that you can help your local businesses to not only survive the pressures of mega-chains and the Internet, you can also help them…
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Going Beyond What’s Expected

We’ve discussed the importance of not going over-the-top for customers so often that it leads to unreasonable expectations beyond what’s sustainable. Rather, we’ve encouraged our readers to strive to deliver a consistently great customer experience with only the occasional grand gesture for the special customer or unique circumstance. That’s all…
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Sometimes the Customer Is Wrong

We’ve all heard that adage that the customer is always right. It’s a mantra that has shaped many of the interactions between businesses and their clientele. Upon closer inspection, however, most of us realize that this age-old saying is not always true. In fact, those of us who’ve worked in…
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Give Customer Service Agents a Break

We live in a world of instant gratification. Products can appear at your doorstep in a matter of hours through same-day delivery, food can show up from a restaurant in a matter of minutes, and information can be found online in seconds. So, no wonder fewer and fewer of us…
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Self-Checkout Woes: When ‘Convenience’ Hurts Your Experience

When self-checkout stands first became popular in the early 2000s, the promise was an attractive one: get in-and-out of the store faster by not having to wait in line for a checker. This worked especially well when you had just a few items—the regular checkout lines would handle the cartloads…
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Mystery Shopping Forever

As a business owner, you might wonder whether mystery shopping in the long term makes sense for your business. Perhaps you’ve thought that at some point, your employees are going to be as well-trained as they can be and that the utility of mystery shopping them will diminish in time.…
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Why You Should Become a Mystery Shopper

Have you heard about the gig economy? In recent years, more and more people have begun taking independent-contract work, offering on-demand services as a way to earn extra money in their spare time. Companies like Uber, GrubHub, Instacart, and many more have cropped up in the last fifteen years, and…
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How Mystery Shopping Can Benefit Your Marketing

When we discuss mystery shopping, we usually do so from the standpoint of how it can directly benefit your business’s customer experience. We emphasize the importance of using the perspectives of regular consumers to gauge your customer service, sales, and support processes from a layperson’s point-of-view. Mystery shoppers observe everything…
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Demystifying Mystery Shops

Many small-business owners are new to the world of mystery shopping. They understand the gist in that that people are sent in to evaluate various aspects of their customer experience, but beyond that generalization, much of what companies like The Brandt Group do remains a mystery—forgive the pun. We value…
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