What is Mystery Shopping & How Can it Help my Small Business?

What You Don’t Know CAN Hurt You!

Companies lose billions of dollars every year simply because of:

• Employee behavior
• Lousy customer service
• Employee theft
• Waste
• Poor safety practices
• Bad accounting procedures

It is important for small business owners to recognize the need to be "proactive” with regards to loss prevention. Mystery shopping is a very effective marketing tool, especially in the restaurant, retail, property management and hotel industries by helping companies proactively reduce losses and guard their assets.

Businesses pay millions of dollars per year in advertising. Getting customers in the door is only the first step. Once they are there, you want to make sure their shopping experience is a good one and that they are indeed receiving the quality of service you want to be delivering. How can you make sure your customers receive the service they come to expect? Mystery shopping can provide you with the answers you need.

What Businesses Use Mystery Shopping?

Many industries can benefit from using mystery shopping services to evaluate their customer service, product presentation, quality of service, business maintenance, how long it takes to be waited on, employee friendliness, and to find out if their employees are adhering to the policies put in place by business owners and/or management.

Mystery shopping can be used as a training tool. One suggestion is to present awards to staff members who get high scores. Another option is to use the mystery shopping reports to follow management performance. Although it is recommended that employees know you have a mystery shopping program in place, they won't know if a customer they are waiting on is a mystery shopper.

It is interesting how I learned about the benefits of mystery shopping for small business owners. I have a client who is a loss prevention consultant. In providing services for him and through our many phone conversations and email exchanges, I had one of my "duh" moments. His services are beneficial to the same target market my services are geared to - that market being small business owners.

So, although I will be recommending his company for loss prevention/mystery shopping services, there is value in this industry's offerings to small business owners and it is for this reason I am sharing this information with my readers.

NW Loss Prevention Consultants offers consulting services to small businesses in the areas of loss prevention, mystery shopping services, and pre-employment background checks. NWLPC has recently added a new service- IPhone and Mystery Shopping.

Watch the video below to find out about this neat and effective new service. BTW - I created this video for NWLPC and found it a little scary that a phone is smarter than I am :). Enjoy!