Mystery Shopping eBook Now!

Transcription

moneymagpie.com eBooks
moneymagpie’s Mystery Shopping eBook
Introduction
Imagine you are the owner of a chain of clothes shops. Whenever you visit a store,
the shop assistants are extremely polite. After all, you’re the boss. The store is
always beautifully laid out, and nothing is too much trouble for your friendly staff.
But what happens when you’re out of sight? Do your employees offer service with
a smile, or do they act as though the customer is always wrong? Do the sales
assistants have hang-ups about hanging things up? Do customers get ignored and
walk out in disgust?
What you need is an undercover agent to visit the shop and report back. What you
need is a mystery shopper.
Working as a mystery shopper is rewarding, fun and sociable. This eBook tells
you everything you need to know, including:
• The best-paying and most reliable mystery shopping agencies.
• A step-by-step guide to the mystery shopping process.
• How to impress mystery shopping agencies and get increasingly good
perks.
• How much you can expect to earn from mystery shopping and how to
maximise your profits.
• A detailed look at two typical mystery shopping questionnaires with
insider tips for completing them perfectly to help secure future work.
• Tips from two seasoned pros with 20 years’ experience in the field
between them.
• How your work as a mystery shopper can improve company culture and
even change Government policy.
• Scams you need to be aware of and what to do if something goes wrong.
I’ve taken a hands-on approach to researching this eBook, becoming a mystery
shopper myself (see chapter four). Once I got the hang of it, I was inundated with
mystery shopping work, and you can be too!
Let us know about your mystery shopping experiences on our Facebook and
Twitter pages – we always love hearing from you!
Good luck!
Jennifer Coles
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Contents
1. What is mystery shopping?
2. The experts’ views
3. Writing up your report
4. Adventures of a rookie mystery shopper by Jennifer Coles
5. Reality, rules and reassurance
6. Scams and how to avoid them
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What is mystery shopping?
Background
Mystery shopping has been taking place since the 1940s, when it was used by the
department stores of New York. Nowadays, almost all sectors employ mystery
shoppers.
Tens of thousands of people across the UK are registered as mystery shoppers.
These secret squirrels are paid to eat in restaurants, drink in bars and buy luxury
goods. In return they write up a full report on the standard of service they receive.
Mystery shopping doesn’t require formal qualifications, so it attracts a diverse range
of applicants. Agencies have a wide range of people on their books, from models to
magistrates.
The industry is growing at an astounding rate. A study conducted by the Mystery
Shopping Providers Association (MSPA), found that 8.1 million mystery shops took
place in the US in 2004, and Nigel Cover, president of MSPA Europe, says that the
number of opportunities within the industry is rising.
Field research takes place in a diverse range of places, including automotive
garages, estate agencies, banks and health spas. There’s a huge range of work
available. A mystery shopper could be enjoying a weekend break one month and
phoning a call centre to complain about their gas bill the next.
In the US, mystery shoppers are increasingly being asked to investigate healthcare
clinics, opticians and dentists. While this is less common in the UK, who knows
what changes healthcare reforms could bring?
All this ‘spying on staff’ might seem a bit spooky, but it’s a reality of modern retail.
Think of the famous restaurant critic A. A. Gill, or ‘Queen of Shops’ Mary Portas.
Both these influential personalities would insist that there’s no excuse for poor
service. Mystery shopping helps keep standards high and gives good sales assistants
a chance to shine.
On some occasions mystery shoppers even contribute towards Government policy
and help to keep consumers safe. In 2009, TNS Research International was
commissioned by the Office of Fair Trading to carry out a study of used car
dealerships in the UK using trained mystery shoppers. The results of this survey
have been used to protect members of the public when they buy from used car dealers.
Benefits
Although some people do make a full-time living out of mystery shopping, agencies
tell us that most people use it to supplement their income by £30-40 a month.
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A typical assignment might involve travelling to a shop, purchasing an item for £10,
travelling home again and spending about 30 minutes on your computer compiling
a report. For this you will be paid £25. This is £15 for your time and £10 to spend on
the item (which you can keep).
To save time and reduce transport costs, it’s a good idea to combine mystery shopping with your weekly shop. If you have to start paying out for petrol or buses to the
shops, it won’t be so worthwhile.
How to apply
While a small number of shops employ mystery shoppers directly, most go through
agencies. So it follows that if you want to become a mystery shopper, you will need
to register with an agency. Below is a list of tried and tested mystery shopping agencies. All these agencies have either been road tested by us Moneymagpies, or they’ve
received lots of positive recommendations on internet forums. Because these agencies use online forms, the registration process is quick and easy.
Directory of mystery shopping agencies:
Checkout UK
ESA
GAPbuster
GfK NOP
Grass Roots
Retail Eyes
Service Monitor Group
T3 Retail Assessments
TNS International
UK IMS
Do any retailers have their own mystery shopping?
Selfridges, the luxury department store famous for its fabulously creative window
displays, accepts mystery shoppers directly through its website. Simply register
and view an online calendar of mystery shopping slots to find a time to suit you.
After the visit you’ll be sent a questionnaire. If you submit this on the day of your
visit, Selfridges will send you a £10 ‘reward’ to thank you. You can only stay on the
Selfridges panel for a limited time, so this should not be considered a regular source
of income.
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The experts’ views
Jasmine Birtles
Moneymagpie founder Jasmine Birtles spent five years mystery shopping. She discovered it while out for lunch with a friend.
“She pulled a stack of Pret A Manger vouchers out of her handbag,” Jasmine remembers, “so I asked her where she got them.
“She said she was a mystery shopper. I thought, ‘what a great idea’. I signed up with
a company online and was offered a meal at PizzaExpress. I took a friend and they
were very impressed that dinner was free.”
Jasmine firmly believes that mystery shopping is a job for someone who has a lot to
say.
“Apparently a lot of people don’t fill the forms in properly, or they don’t write very
much. I don’t understand that as I’m opinionated. The reason for a mystery shopper
to be there is to keep standards up. At the same time I think it’s important to say if
you think a staff member is very good.”
For Jasmine, one of the best things about mystery shopping is the flexibility.
She said: “Because of the job I do, I get a lot of last-minute requests to appear on
television, so it’s hard for me to say for sure whether I’ll be able to go mystery shopping a week on Wednesday.
“But what I’ve found is that some mystery shopping companies don’t mind this. You
can ask to be put on the ‘last-minute request’ list, and they’ll ring you up and say
‘can you go for a meal tonight?’ That’s great for me because it works on an ad hoc
basis.”
Although Jasmine’s too busy for mystery shopping now, she estimates that she
made about £800 a year in free goodies when she was doing it.
Barry Grossman
In 1996, Barry Grossman spotted an ad placed in the Guardian newspaper by
mystery shopping company Research Resources. Little did he know this was the
start of ten years in mystery shopping, and a move into a full-time career in market
research.
His first mystery shopping assignment was to visit 16 pubs, luckily not in one go! He
had to visit some Wetherspoon pubs and some owned by their competitors, and he
was paid £4 per pub.
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He said: “It was a good talking point. I could tell my mates I was getting paid to
drink in the pub. I was working as a freelance writer, so mystery shopping was a
good way to make some money on the side. I got sent to some nice restaurants; not
wonderful, but not the local burger joint either.
“I’ve probably done more pubs and restaurants than anything, but you can get odd
requests like going to a train station with the timetable and standing there all day to
see how many trains are late. It’s not always shopping.
“Things soon started to get more lucrative. At one point I was getting a few hundred
pounds a week, back in the 90s, just to check that high street charity promoters
were doing their job. It got to the point where they were asking me to stay in hotels
and to try Eurostar.
“After a few years, things changed. I think more people were trying to get into
mystery shopping, so they stopped paying you for staying in hotels. You got your expenses but other than that you did it for the experience. Still, in these thrifty times,
a free weekend break is not to be sniffed at.”
We asked Barry if he had any advice for people getting into mystery shopping today.
He said that because most of the assignments are now announced by email, you
need to be the sort of person who is often on your email and very quick to respond.
He also suggested you do what you can to build up a reputation for reliability.
Barry especially recommends the flexible nature of mystery shopping: “It’s good
work if you want to be able to pick and choose the times you work and to be able to
say ‘no’. There’s no contract you have to sign to say you’ll definitely do certain jobs.”
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3
Writing up your report
When you get home after your assignment, you’re required to complete an online
form. You have to submit this on the same day as your assignment, but it’s fine to go
mystery shopping on your lunch break and fill out the form in the evening.
Although it might be tempting to rush through the form, a good write-up is the key
to getting more mystery shopping work and goodies! Here is how you do it well:
1. Complete the form as soon as possible after the assignment. This will
ensure you don’t forget key details. It might be a good idea to print a
paper copy of the form, and complete it in the car after your assignment
(making sure no one can see you). Type these notes into the online form
once you get home.
2. Spelling and grammar is very important, as Luke Ryan of Checkout UK
explains. “We are astounded sometimes when people can’t use upper
case letters or basic punctuation,” he said. “We have to correct spelling mistakes before we pass the report on to our client, and when this
happens, we won’t offer the mystery shopper any furtherwork.” Use a
spell checker and write in full sentences. Online dictionaries and
thesauruses can help you to express yourself accurately.
3. Make sure you write a full paragraph of three or four sentences for each
section of the form, not just a brief comment. Annette Middleton from T3
Retail Assessments says: “We ask the mystery shopper to provide as
much information as possible within their questionnaire so the client can
get a real feel for what happened during the mystery visit.”
4. The questions on the mystery shopping forms are usually very specific. However, if you’re struggling to think what to write, imagine you are
telling a close friend about your visit to the shop. What are the main
points you would tell them?
5. Try to be specific (use details, don’t be vague) and objective (keep your
opinions out of it). For example, say ‘we queued at the bar for five and
a half minutes,’ instead of ‘there was a horribly long wait at the bar.’
Write ‘the assistant said “Is there anything I can help you with?’” instead
of ‘the assistant was lovely.’
Our friends at Service Monitor Group and T3 Retail Assessments have kindly
provided sample questionnaires used in actual mystery shopping assignments.
These are exactly the kind of forms you could expect to be given as a mystery
shopper, so it’s worth familiarising yourself with them to get yourself ahead of
the game. We’ve labelled the forms with important advice. For privacy, company
names and details have been changed or removed.
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Do you want to learn more?
You can purchase the full eBook online at
http://www.moneymagpie.com/ebooks/mystery-shopping-ebook
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Mystery Shopping eBook Now!

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