How to Manage Your Leads

In a perfect world, customers would come into your business fully educated in your offerings and know exactly what they want to purchase. But seeing as how that’s rarely the case, you employ salespeople to not only educate those customers and help them select their purchases, but also suggest add-ons…
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Unconventional Mystery Shopping

Most mystery shopping can be broken into two categories: on-site and over-the-phone. In both cases, mystery shoppers interact with your employees to assess customer service, salesmanship, and other aspects of the experience, such as cleanliness, merchandising, wait times, the complexity of the automated phone-tree, and more. These are tried and…
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The P&L Report of Mystery Shopping

The Brandt Group offers many detailed reports with which our clients can interpret the mystery shopping data we generate. They can identify big-picture trends or focus on the minutiae, covering your entire company, a regional division, an individual store, a specific department, or even one employee. Each report has its…
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Where Quantity and Quality Meet

Common questions we’re asked by our new clients is, “How often should I mystery shop?” and “How many feedback surveys do I need?” To gain an understanding of our philosophy, let’s take a dive into the notions of quantity versus quality. Both Are Valuable You’ve undoubtedly heard adages about them,…
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What Makes The Brandt Group Different

Just as your customers have choices on where to buy, so too do our mystery-shopping clients. Here’s why our clients choose us: Real Shoppers The Brandt Group recruits shoppers local to your market to ensure you receive the most relevant and genuine feedback. Using your prescribed demographics and mystery-shopping frequency,…
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Customer Service Is Your Most Important Product

Think about what your most important product is. If you own a restaurant, perhaps it’s your bestselling dessert; if you run a retail store, it might be a popular item with a big gross margin; if you operate a computer repair service, it’s surely the skills of your technicians. While…
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The Value of Roleplay

Roleplay has long been used a training tool in the world of sales and customer service. In fact, one of the first articles to come up if you search the topic is an article from the May 1987 issue of the Harvard Business Review. In fact, this concept originates with…
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Commandment No. 10 – Thou Shalt Practice the CANEI Principle

We have finally arrived at the tenth entry on Shep Hyken’s Forbes article, The Ten Commandments of Superior Customer Service, titled “Thou Shalt Practice the CANEI Principle”. What does CANEI mean? As Hyken explains, “CANEI is Dr. Edward Deming’s concept that stands for Constant and Never Ending Improvement. It is…
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Commandment No. 9 – Thou Shalt Lighten the Lines

The penultimate entry on Shep Hyken’s Forbes article, The Ten Commandments of Superior Customer Service, is “Thou Shalt Lighten the Lines.” Hyken begins by observing that no one likes waiting in line. He goes on to explain “the word ‘line’ is a metaphor for making the customer wait unnecessarily for…
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