Mystery Shoppers Evaluate Employees
By Dave
Burdick
It's no conspiracy theory - spies walk among us every
day.
They walk among us in hotels, retail stores and
restaurants. They monitor every customer-service-related
facet of the stores on their lists. They learn routines,
click stopwatches and take notes stealthily.
Mystery shoppers, secret shoppers, spotters, virtual
customers, undercover performance evaluators - there are
many names for them. But they all get paid by employers to
make sure that customer service is acceptable.
"We're like corporate spies," says Judi Hartleben,
president of Service Alliance Inc., a company that
provides mystery-shopping services. "Companies hire us to
evaluate their own employees or to evaluate other
employees" - using mystery shoppers to scout the
competition for possible hires.
Service Alliance is based in Aurora, Colo., but serves the
entire country. Furniture companies, property-management
companies, liquor stores, even convenience stores,
Hartleben says, will ask the company to check up on
employees in a number of ways.
"Usually it's customer service, at a very minimum. There
are things called integrity shops, and that's where you're
testing the honesty, usually of someone running a cash
register -and we don't do those," Hartleben says. She says
that such missions can be "very uncomfortable" for the
shopper, and that she won't ask her shoppers to do those
because she doesn't like doing them herself.
Integrity shops can consist of overpaying and seeing just
how hard a clerk will try to give full and exact change.
Desiree Coats, who works at the Sunglass Hut in Boulder,
Colo., said that secret shoppers come through about once
every four months, and that if an employee fulfills a set
of customer-service criteria - and the secret shopper
reports it - it means an extra hundred bucks on the next
paycheck.
So if you can figure out exactly when a secret shopper's
checking you out, you can give them five-star service and
take the rest of the season off.
But there's a reason they call it secret shopping.
"I don't think anybody ever knew," says Anne, a mystery
shopper. Anne, from Boulder, didn't want her last name
used - it might hurt business.
"I used to be a federal investigator," she says. "I guess
I had that background anyway, you know, to be really
discreet."
The pay isn't great, at first. When you're getting used to
the protocol and the scheduling, you might do one shop,
and that'd score you between $10 and $25, maybe.
But once you get the hang of it, you might make a nice
little supplemental income for yourself, while also
scoring benefits on some missions.
"One I did in Vail, I was paid like $250 on top of lodging
...," Anne says. Those big-time shops mean filing big-time
reports. For a similar shop she did in Aspen, Anne says
she had to fill out a 15-page report.
"I wouldn't say to quit your job and do it," she says.
"It's a good thing to do if you have the time and the
inclination."
Anne says that she's mystery shopping less while in
skin-care school full time.
"I probably am just doing one a month or so," she says.
"When I was really into it, I did maybe two or three a
week."
Reprinted from
http://www.redding.com/redd/nw_business/article/0,2232,REDD_17527_3594653,00.html
Yours
in success,
Jennifer Callahan
admin@mysteryshopnow.com
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