One of the questions that sometimes comes up with our new clients is how we at The Brandt Group find mystery shoppers to perform all our audits. Is mystery shopping a vocation? Do mystery shoppers attend classes, receive special training, and earn certifications? What does it even take to become a mystery shopper?
The Critic’s Folly
While a mystery shopper can be highly trained and certified, we have found time and again that average consumers provide much more honest, real-world feedback. It may seem counterintuitive, but professional shoppers tend to be overqualified, which can be a hinderance. Overqualification tends to lead to a kind of myopia, where someone who’s become an expert at completing customer-service evaluations begins to become too focused on technical details and unable to grasp the big picture. More importantly, they become so far removed from being a normal consumer that they can no longer have a normal experience.
Put another way, think about a movie critic who has spent enough of his working life evaluating films that he can no longer just watch a movie without hyper-analyzing it. This is the disconnect we see in movie reviews where audience scores are so out-of-sync with the critics. The movie studios surely enjoy receiving critical accolades, but you can bet what they really care most about is pleasing the average moviegoer. That’s their real audience, the one that buys movie tickets. And it’s the same with our clients—they need feedback from their target audience: regular people. They’re the ones who patronize their business.
The Best Classroom is Life
Rather than rely on shoppers being trained in seminars, we have found that the best instruction is life itself. Regular consumers already have a ton of experience interacting with restaurant servers, car salespeople, retail staff, customer service representatives, and so on. They’ve been out to eat countless times, been shopping, opened up a bank account, been given a tour of an apartment property, or whatever else a business does on a regular basis. Even if that business is niche, many of these experiences are translatable because—at the end of the day—most interactions between employees and customers should go a similar way. It’s just the products and services that change.
How Do You Recruit?
As with every business out there these days, recruitment is a challenge. Whether it’s the Great Resignation or the pandemic itself, everyone is facing staffing troubles right now. But since we don’t rely on full-time mystery shoppers, opting instead for real-world consumers, our shoppers do these assignments in their spare time. This means that as the national staffing situation remains in heavy flux, mystery shopping still presents a compelling opportunity for average people regardless of where they are on their career paths.
But we always need more shoppers because we want as many different voices and opinions as possible. If you yourself are interested in mystery shopping, we would love it if you checked out our page on the subject. If you are a client or thinking about becoming one, we would also be highly interested in working with you to recruit shoppers from within your own customer base—your patrons are literally prime examples of your target demographic! Plus, the opportunity for some of your customers to receive a reward for shopping at your business is a great advertising gambit in its own right. Let’s get started now!
