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

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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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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