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

What If My Employee Spots a Shopper?

When I worked in the wireless industry, our parent company used to send mystery shoppers into our stores to measure how well we followed their prescribed customer experience (a literal flowchart we had posted in our backroom), as well as to test our promotion and product knowledge.  We had to…
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Scams to Watch Out For

Regrettably, thieves will attempt to turn every type of legitimate business into a scam, and mystery shopping is not immune. The Federal Trade Commission has a great write-up on what red flags to look out for. Historically, the most common mystery shopping scam was the one that convinced victims that they had to…
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Keeping an Eye on Your Competition with Competitive Mystery Shopping

As we’ve discussed in earlier posts, self-scouting is hugely important to identifying your business’s strengths and weaknesses.  Without a doubt, that’s the baseline, foundational exercise every business owner should engage in regularly.  But there’s another critical dimension you can investigate, which will provide you with something just as important: context.…
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Connecting with Millennials

There is an abundance of articles that describe millennials as being self-entitled, coddled, and possessing little-to-no social skills.  We’ve all heard stories about young twenty-something hipsters who spend more time photographing their meals than actually enjoying them.  The truth is, sweeping generalizations, especially negatives ones like these, serve no one,…
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The Biggest Reason Secret Shoppers Can Benefit You

As Coach Vince Lombardi said, “Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing.  You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do things right once in a while; you do them right all of the time.  Winning is a habit.” In order to enjoy long-term…
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How to Earn Bigger Tips

As Tim Kirkland observes in The Renegade Server, if you ask most servers how to make better tips, they’ll tell you things like, “Be friendly”, “Make sure the order is right and fast”, “Keep the beverages full”, and say, “Thank you.” These are all great, but they’re the kinds of things…
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5 Signs Your Customer Service is Failing

Failing customer service is a death knell for any business — there’s no surer guarantee of decline.  Spotting those early signs is critical, and it’s not always as obvious as seeing bad reviews on Facebook or Yelp. Employee Satisfaction If your employees are unhappy, your customers will be too.  Employee…
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4 Ways to Grow Your Business Through Staff Development

If customers are the lifeblood of your business, your employees are the muscles that power it.  You know the work doesn’t get done without your employees’ boots on the ground, and giving them the tools to do that work will not only ensure their success but also their job satisfaction.…
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When Customers Complain

Customer complaints are an unavoidable challenge for any business to confront, but knowing how to deal with them can do more than save sales—they also build customer loyalty.  In that vein, 7 Steps for Dealing with Angry Customers (Forbes, 2013) has some key customer service tips, including the core tenets like, “Actively…
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Monitor Your Employee Customer Service

Customer service is the lifeblood of every business and is something that will make or break any company long term.  But putting signs in the break room that emphasize how important the customer is can only accomplish so much.  Even a rigorous initial training program for your employees can break down…
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3 Ways to Use Telephone Mystery Shops for Your Business

Most would say that phone conversation is a dying art — text messages and social media have reduced it to a fraction of what it once was.  But having a staff that can still sell and drive business to your location over the phone is as critical now as it…
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Building Customer Loyalty Through Customer Satisfaction Surveys

If there’s one key lesson a mystery shopping company can teach a business, it’s that customer loyalty isn’t something you earn once — it’s something you earn again and again, every day.  And knowing what your customers think about your business isn’t simply a luxury; it’s a necessity to make…
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