There are a lot of great benefits to mystery shopping your business. Mystery shopping your stores or restaurants gives you the information you need to effective evaluate your progress to customer service goals. Oftentimes mystery shopping will reveal gaps in the stores customer service policies, or a location that is not keeping up to the companies standards. What you might not have thought about while considering a mystery shopping program, is the great advertisement it can be.
When a company signs up with ACE Mystery Shopping, the first thing we do is tell the shoppers is our database about the new shops available. We have over 170,000 shoppers in our database who get our emails and receive calls about new shops. Normally we have many more shoppers respond, wanting to complete the shop, than we can actually use. Depending on the frequency of mystery shops we do at your location and how many shoppers we have there, we might have 20+ shoppers, per location, who inquire about doing the shop for us. On top of that, we would have many more people that see the emails after someone has already taken the shop. In a highly populated area, this could translate to hundreds of shoppers who see the name of your business, and are encouraged to visit the location nearest them.
Not everyone can mystery shop the location at once, and that leaves some shoppers disappointed that they cannot shop your store. Some of these shoppers might be people who are shop at your store or eat at your restaurant. Some of these might be people who have never heard of your business. Either way, because of our efforts to recruit shoppers for you location, there are numerous people who are thinking about your business that weren’t before the email. Just because the shoppers are not performing the shop, it doesn’t mean they won’t visit the location. Not only do you get a chance to impress the person who has been awarded the mystery shop, but you have a great chance of winning new business from people that would otherwise never paid attention to your business. In most cases, our shoppers frequent the locations they shop even when they are not mystery shopping. Some, who will never do a mystery shop at your business, will visit your store because of our contact.
What about the shoppers that have a negative experiences? We don’t allow our shoppers to complain publicly about shops they do for us. Their complaining is done in the mystery shopping survey. This allows you to correct problems on your end without the backlash you would get from a regular customer. Not only that, but our shoppers appreciate the fact that you are working toward making their experience better. Mystery shoppers feel like they are helping to make a difference in your company and are not going to hold a bad experience against you.
When we get a new client, we not only alert the shoppers we already have, we also begin targeting the area around the new clients locations for new shoppers. We are constantly recruiting to make sure that we keep fresh faces at all locations. Our shoppers are also more likely to recommend stores and restaurants to their friends, that provide them with mystery shopping opportunities.
There are a lot of reasons to start a mystery shopping program for you business. If you want our mystery shopping program to bring more foot traffic through your doors, for more reasons than one, please call or email me to day. I would love to talk about what you are looking for in a mystery shopping program.
John Mark Allen
john@acemysteryshopping.com
866-240-7324
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