How To Find The Best Mystery Shopping Companies

| Saturday, October 1, 2011
By Xavier Rault


If you own or manage a retail establishment, you are probably aware of the benefits to be had from using a mystery shopping company. Although there are rewards to working with these types of companies, it is important to choose carefully in order to find the best quality of service and a secret shopper service which understands your business.

Quality

It is important to see sample reports before you decide which company to work with and never take their word for it in terms of the services they provide. Remember that no matter how great the report might look, a pretty presentation is no substitute for the substantive data you need to improve your business operations. Without the information you need, the report is worth nothing to you - keep this in mind.

Shoppers

A lot of companies are taken in by the claims made by some of these services to have thousands of different mystery shoppers. Even if claims like this from a particular company happen to be true, this is not enough by itself. It does not matter so much how many shoppers a mystery shopping company has, but how effectively they perform their work and just as importantly, how well the company tracks and compiles the data they collect.

Price

You will need to put in some time and effort to do this, but the return on your investment will make it all worthwhile in the end. One thing you should not do is choose your mystery shopping company based solely on their price. Quality should be your top priority here and even if you are working within tight budget constraints, you should still go for the best service you can afford.

References

Another mistake to avoid making is not calling all of the references that a company has. Do you just call one? Maybe two? You want to make sure that you are calling as many references as possible. The goal is to find out how long they have been working together and what makes this company, far better than the other mystery shopping companies they may have tried.

Competition

Even if you are very careful about choosing a mystery shopping company, it could still be the case that you are disappointed with the quality of their work. If this is how things turn out, move on and hire a different company instead. You have a number of companies to choose from, so do not settle for a service whose quality is lacking.

If you have to start the process over again, make sure that you are paying closer attention to all of the common mistakes that are made when hiring mystery shopping companies. You might just have found yourself with a little bad luck with the customer service specialist that was sent out.
Tell a new company this and demand that only the best in their business is assigned to you.

The more quickly you can find a mystery shopping company which meets your customer service experience needs, the better prepared your business will be to upgrade its operations to serve your customers better and ultimately, to bring in higher profits.




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