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Wednesday, November 07, 2007

How mystery shopiing jobs can improve the Quality

Mystery shopping is an exciting opportunity for hundreds of thousands of consumers to earn some cash and freebies while helping quality customer service improve. Mystery shoppers do not simply go around shopping malls and gas stations to earn cash or get free services. Their job has much deeper long-term consequences, because mystery shopping helps companies enhance their customer service or deliver better products to clients.

Mystery shopping provides very diverse opportunities to secret shoppers to perform varying tasks for cash payment or for discounted merchandise and freebies. For instance, you can get paid to fill your gas tank up at a local gas station, while having to assess the staff friendliness and responsiveness, and if they offer you to wash your car’s windscreen. Mystery shopping is not a detective work, because it’s not meant to blame anyone individually for doing or not doing something. However, mystery shopping helps detect if staff complies with the work instructions, work ethics and if staff performance lives up to clients’ expectations. Mystery shopping does not have a punitive intent, but rather a corrective one. Moreover, mystery shopping is also guided by formal and informal instructions and ethical guidelines that every secret shopper needs to follow when completing their tasks. Therefore, mystery shopping is not a chaotic experiment with frontline patience and loyalty, but a legitimate market research method to assess the condition of customer service on various business premises.

What do you do as a mystery shopper? Mystery shopping has a tremendous advantage over other incentivized programs – it is always different. On one occasion, you may be asked to count people waiting in line; on another, to check if staff is competent about the products on sale. Yet there are so many alternative possibilities that you can never be bored with mystery shopping. Moreover, you can do mystery shopping both offline and online, because web shopping is almost as popular as the classis mystery shopping – going to the shopping locations.

Many people do not believe that mystery shopping actually has really serious implications, but that is true. Mystery shopping is a very responsible job and that’s why it’s paid and people are rewarded with various cash and non-cash incentives. Companies readily hire and pay secret shoppers, because undercover customers help identify the weakest links in customer service. That is found to be a very efficient way to improve customer service, because direct assessment always mobilizes staff to perform over their usual level, while the prevailing level of customer service is what truly matters.

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