SCAM ALERTS
(406) 586-3036
FREE PHONE SHOPS

BLOG

Grow your business through employee training, improving company communication and morale and inspect what you expect through mystery shopping reviews.

How to Compartmentalize

Considering that most managers work in excess of forty hours each week, it’s no wonder that separating work life from your home life is such a challenge. How can anyone avoid mixing the stresses of one with the other? No one wants to take a tough day at work home…
VIEW FULL POST

Three Simple Tweaks for Better Customer Service

Whatever your business’s wares, whether cuisine, cars, groceries, or something else, your first and most important product is your customer service. How your customers are treated and the impression they’re left with when they leave are the most important factors for both repeat patronage and evangelism. Your impressive selection of…
VIEW FULL POST

Good Habits Are the Fuel that Drives Your Success

As George Brontén states in his article, Why Your People Keep Missing Quota—And What to Do About It, “goals are more often missed than attained.” He explains, “Goals, without underpinning habits” are “bad for you.” Why are they bad? The Problem of Goals Without Habits To summarize, Brontén argues that…
VIEW FULL POST

Why Shop with The Brandt Group?

You have a lot of choices as a mystery shopper, from the kinds of assignments you’ll want to accept, to when you’re available to complete them. Among those important choices is which mystery-shopping networks you’ll want to join; so why would you choose The Brandt Group as one of them?…
VIEW FULL POST

Becoming a Great Mystery Shopper

As you gain experience as a mystery shopper, you’ll want to find other ways to improve your skills and develop into an even more valuable member of your mystery shopping network. After all, your work represents you on some level, so we understand why you want to take pride in…
VIEW FULL POST

Advice for New Mystery Shoppers

The Brandt Group welcomes you to the exciting and rewarding world of mystery shopping! Your participation will help improve the customer service, products, and services offered by businesses in your community. Take satisfaction in knowing that your opinions really do matter. Client businesses don’t contract with mystery shopping companies to…
VIEW FULL POST

Why Comments Matter in Mystery Shopping

The bulk of mystery-shop surveys are Yes/No questions, sometimes sprinkled with a couple opinion scales (rate the customer service 1 to 5, for example). These allow you to capture the raw data, to quantify an experience so you can score it. You can ask whether an employee introduced him or…
VIEW FULL POST

Workplace Harassment

Harassment is an uncomfortable subject for business owners. No one wants his or her employees—or customers, for that matter—to feel violated or objectified. Because most of us live by the golden rule, that we ought to treat others as we want to be treated, we feel a deep empathy towards…
VIEW FULL POST

Surviving in the World of Big Chains and Online Warehouses

The Verge posted a fascinating article describing so-called Amazon Nomads, independent merchants who scour out-of-the-way stores (often failing chains in small towns) for products on clearance to snap up and sell using Amazon’s storefront. But with all of the prognostications about the death of brick-and-mortar, one can’t help but think…
VIEW FULL POST

The High Cost of Saving a Buck

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to save a buck. That’s why so many of us choose to shop at big-box stores that deal in such a high volume they can afford to sell their products closer to cost. Those narrower profit margins still translate to larger profits overall due to…
VIEW FULL POST

Managing Your Productivity: Striving for Zero

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks delving into how to improve your productivity with the processing and organizing workflow described in David Allen’s Getting Things Done book on the subject. One of the concepts we covered was the notion of an inbox, at which time we described this as…
VIEW FULL POST

Managing Your Productivity: When to Say Yes

As we established last week, your time is a limited resource, so you have to wisely invest it into the tasks that matter the most. Returning to David Allen’s Getting Things Done workflow, let’s take a look at the “Is it actionable?” step to see what we should do when…
VIEW FULL POST