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

3 Ways to Become a Great Mystery Shopper

If you researching mystery shopping online, you could be forgiven for thinking that becoming a good shopper means taking online courses and earning certifications. While those endeavors don’t hurt, they aren’t necessary either. Truth be told, mystery-shopping companies like The Brandt Group want real people with honest opinions—because that’s what…
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Trust as an Effective Management Tool

Being an effective manager is a lot like juggling multiple spinning plates: you have to lead by example, coordinate your subordinates’ schedules effectively, handle customer service emergencies, engage with ownership, or any of another dozen duties you’re likely imagining right now. But management is more than a fun parlor trick:…
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What Can We Learn from the Psychology of Menu Design?

Jessica Hullinger at Mental Floss posted an article last year covering various psychological tricks restaurant menus employ to ensure ease of use and profitability. Here are two tricks we’d like to highlight and expound upon that are relevant even beyond menus: The first point that Hullinger highlights is that well-designed menus limit…
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Fostering Loyalty Through the Customer Experience

Service That Sells posted a recent article titled What Restaurant Guest Loyalty Is (and What It Isn’t) that dives into how to win repeat patronage. Even though the article is specifically targeted at restaurateurs, its advice is actually applicable to any industry that considers customer service to be an important differentiator—which is…
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4 Ways to Improve Your Sales Through Mystery Shopping

Mystery shopping can measure many different facets of any business, especially any that is customer-facing. Whether your company is in the business of sales or services, mystery shopping can benefit it in four key ways: Gauge your Sales and Service Processes There’s an order of operations in any business, from the…
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Cross-Business Promotion for a Better Customer Experience

There’s so much advertising noise in the world today, both in the traditional media of television, radio, and print, as well as in new media online, you can’t blame business owners from wondering how they can reach new customers.  After all, large competitors with enormous advertising budgets can yell louder…
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Taking Ownership

Rich Parubrub wrote a great advice column on RunningRestaurants.com called “9 Tips for Managing Negative Restaurant Reviews”, to make sure “your voice is heard where your restaurant is being discussed.”  While all these tips are great and certainly apply to more than just restaurants, let’s focus on two that are closely…
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Moments of Truth by Steve Beck

Steve Beck is a trainer for The Brandt Group who specializes in keynote speeches, conducts workshops, and offers a wide range of training options to help take your employees skills to the next level.  Learn more about Steve at http://www.beckseminsars.com. In business, a Moment of Truth (MOT) is defined as, ‘When a customer…
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Why Mystery Shopping Is Here to Stay

It should surprise no one that the marketplace is changing rapidly as sales and services move to the Internet.  And with the long, slow decline and consolidation of brick and mortar, one couldn’t be blamed for wondering about how a business could compete in this evolving landscape. As storefronts move…
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Make Your Staff the Difference

Chris Peterson published an article last year titled 7 Reasons Why Traditional Retailers Are Struggling, which covers some of the mistakes retailers are making in the face of online competition.  Number seven on that list, “Associates are treated as an expense … not as a strategic differentiator” is something we’ll expound…
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How to Use Your Mystery Shopping Results

In previous blog entries, we’ve talked about how precise a tool mystery shopping is because it allows a business to target specific initiatives to measure everything from how well the staff is executing to whether the background music is enjoyable at a retail location.  But once you’ve aggregated all that…
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