How to Find Mystery Shoppers in My Area
Mystery shoppers offer companies the customer's perspective on the overall shopping experience of the store. Retail businesses must treat their customers better than competitors if they want to maintain a competitive edge. If you want to improve customer satisfaction, you can hire mystery shopping companies who will employ customers in your local area and send them out as mystery shoppers to shop in your stores and report their experiences back to you.
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Instructions
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Create a custom questionnaire for mystery shoppers based on the specific feedback you need. Mystery shopping companies already have basic questionnaires you can use to get general feedback about the cleanliness, customer service and buying experience. But you may want to obtain some additional information about the mystery shopper's experience. You may want to know about a particular department in the store, or you might ask shoppers to gauge the mood of other shoppers in the store.
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Find potential mystery shopping companies through the International Mystery Shopping Alliance. Their member companies are all expert agencies with a high level of experience. This is the place to go to find local agencies from which you can choose.
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Ask several mystery shopping companies the qualifications of their shoppers. Mystery shoppers should be good observers and have good writing ability. They must be able to write up reports to give feedback concerning their shopping experiences.
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Compare the costs of different services. Some charge for each report, which could include multiple visits to a single store, while other services charge for each visit. They may charge extra for a custom questionnaire, so you should take this into account when pricing different services.
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Set up a schedule with the mystery shopping company. You must enforce deadlines by asking the mystery shopping company to send shoppers to visit your stores as many times as you need before a certain date. If the company cannot guarantee that they will send enough shoppers to your stores, go with a company that can make that guarantee.
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Join the Mystery Shopping Providers Association (MSPA) to stay up-to-date on the latest practices in the mystery shopping industry. Over 150 companies have joined the MSPA to learn the best ways to improve the shopping experience in their stores. The MSPA holds conferences throughout the world to educate its members. Join them at Mysteryshopping.org.
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Tips & Warnings
Your mystery shoppers should perform a variety of actions beyond just looking at the store's appearance. They should ask the workers questions and make purchases. You can also have them file complaints to the store to see how the process works from a customer's perspective.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit shopping cart image by Mat Hayward from Fotolia.com
