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Shrinkflation

According to Wikipedia, shrinkflation “is the process of items shrinking in size or quantity, or even sometimes reformulating or reducing quality, while their prices remain the same or increase.” The term is relatively new, and is usually attributed to British economist Pippa Malmgren, who used it in a Twitter conversation…
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Customer Loyalty Is Always Up for Grabs

One of the most important pursuits for any company is maximum customer loyalty. In fact, we’ve devoted countless blog posts to this idea, and we’ve structured our mystery-shopping service around the idea of earning that loyalty. Why? Because loyal customers equate to repeat business, naturally, and they also lead to…
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Can Self-Service Fit Within Customer Service?

Self-service options have been all-the-rage for many years now, with one of its earliest manifestations appearing in the form of pay-at-the-pump gas stations. According to PetroleumServiceCompany.com, “In 1973, a station in Abilene, Texas, invented pay-at-the-pump. By 1994, about thirteen percent of convenience stores offered pay-at-the-pump. Less than a decade later…
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How Does Shopper Recruitment Work?

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…
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Beyond Compensation and Benefits

The specter of the Great Resignation continues to haunt most companies around the country, as droves and droves of employees are resigning to pursue other opportunities. With the workforce in so much flux, many businesses—especially small proprietorships—are rightly concerned about losing their best employees and having to deal with a…
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How to Manage Your Boss

Managing your own boss sounds oxymoronic, at first. We often think about management as being a downstream action, with someone above managing you, and you managing those further down the chain. As it turns out, the most effective leaders do both: they take the responsibility of making sure tasks get…
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How to Challenge Authority Respectfully

Unless you’re the business owner, president, or chief executive of your company, you always have someone higher up to answer to. After all, employees by definition are employed by someone else. And regardless of the kind of job you’re working, you’ve almost certainly experienced moments when you’ve disagreed with managerial…
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The Tide of Employee Turnover

While The Great Resignation has thrust the problem of employee-turnover into the spotlight recently, it turns out that it’s not actually a new challenge. It’s been a long, long time since the norm was individuals working the breadth of their careers for one company and retiring with a pension. In…
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Great Service, No Excuses

The pandemic has either created or magnified a myriad of problems for manufacturers, distributors, and businesses all across the world. Supply is constrained and delayed, and costs have risen dramatically. Add to this the labor shortage, and businesses are left scrambling to find a way to tread water, let alone…
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