SECRET SHOPPING

Secret Shopping or Mystery Shopping is a tool used by market research companies as a tool to measure quality of retail service. Companies send mystery shoppers to 'act' as shoppers or to legitimately shop in return for some combination of cash, store credit, purchase discounts, or the goods or services purchased.

Instructions to mystery shoppers can include a script of behavior, questions to ask, complaints to give, purchases to make, and measures to record, such as time it takes to receive attention from an employee or receive a service, or the responses given to questions.

Secret Shopping Facts

By Marcus Peterson
Following the rapid growth of the Secret Shopping industry, recent years have seen myths about this job circulating on the internet, local papers and other forms of mass media. If you are a Secret Shopper aspirant, it is imperative that you learn to differentiate between the facts and fiction associated with this industry.

Many people, inspired by Ads on the Internet and other sources, are of the impression that Secret Shopping can lead to the road to riches, which is totally false. Secret Shopping is only meant to be a part-time job that enables you to earn a little side income. Earnings, for example are rarely more than $20 to $40 per assignment.

Secret Shopping is not only about the shopping, traveling or getting free gifts. Though you normally don't need prior experience, having customer service experience, good communication and writing skills are a must to become an effective Secret Shopper. Personal qualities like patience, practicality, punctuality etc are also equally important. Therefore, Secret Shopping is a more serious job than most people assume it would be.

Another fact Secret Shopper applicants should know is that genuine Secret Shopping Companies do not charge registration, application or training fees. If you come across any Ad that requests money for information or other fees, never respond. This could be the work of some potential scammers, especially if they refused to divulge information about their identity.

Secret Shopping is not an easy job where you can make money shopping and drinking coffee all day. Assignments can be tough especially with bigger business setups because crucial management decisions are made according to the evaluation reports you submit. This means that a Secret Shopper has to observe and pay close attention to every detail at all times, which is not exactly a totally stress-free job.

Secret Shoppers provides detailed information about secret shoppers, how to become a secret shopper, restaurant secret shoppers and more. Secret Shoppers is affiliated with Instant Win Sweepstakes.

The purpose behind the concept of Mystery Shopping is to allow businesses to gain improved customer insight into how the customer service related functions of their business are performing, and utilize the information gathered as part of performance management and service improvement initiatives.

Pay is highly variable, depending on the company facilitating the mystery shop, the experience level of the mystery shopper, availability of mystery shoppers in the area, and shop being tested. Novice mystery shoppers can earn less than minimum wage after accounting for time and cost involved to perform the scenario. Mystery shoppers must read and understand the requirements of the client. Gas mileage to and from the store is not usually reimbursed. Many scenarios involving the purchase and return of an item require the mystery shopper to wait for an uncompensated period of minutes or hours before they can return the item purchased.

In the case of nonreturnable services, such as a meal at a restaurant or an evening's stay at a hotel, mystery shoppers sometimes receive the nonreturnable service as their sole compensation. Reports on restaurant and hotel assignments can be much more detailed than other shopping reports, and can take hours to complete. (Wikipedia)