Mystery Shopping / Secret Shopping
Mystery Shopping is a common practice in a lot of restaurant, retail, casino, automotive and hospitality industries because it gives you first hand insight into what it’s like to be a customer. Mystery shopping can also be referred to as secret shopping or using a silent shopper. It can be used to gather specific information about a product or service, or to check up on the customer experience and what type of customer service they receive. You can dictate what a shopper buys, how they behave and what types of questions they ask in order to receive the most specific feedback and reporting about their shopping experience. HS Brands will work with your company to come up with a report that is specific for your shopping experience, or you can just use the standard HS Brands mystery shopping report.
Are your employees honest?
Integrity Shopping
Integrity shops are an important part of mystery shopping and a loss prevention program since they can gauge the honesty of your employees and uncover dishonest employees. Simple tasks like leaving cash on a register to more complex ones like bartering for a discount “hook up” can be tested.
Bar Spotting
Another form of integrity shopping is bar spotting in the restaurant and nightclub industries. We have specially trained bar spotters who will sit for an allotted amount of time and watch for over pouring of alcohol, proper carding procedures, health and safety regulation violations, continuing to serve intoxicated individuals and mishandling of cash and tips.
Phone Shops
Rather than sending someone physically into your location, we can always call to check up on the customer service, product or promotion knowledge that is conveyed over the phone. This also means the telephone conversation can be recorded (applicable in certain states), giving you the actual conversation between your employee and the contractor. You can then use this for internal training as necessary.
E-Forms
Using our software, we can collect data from many different areas of your business. We can build surveys to be completed internally by your employees that yield important data pertaining to your business. Surveys can be completed by district or regional managers as they visit each store and go through operational checklists. HR professionals can also use the software to convert all hard copy paperwork to digital files that can be organized and accessed from anywhere. The software enables anything to be uploaded to and housed in our software system, which gives your company access to real time data from anywhere.
Video Shops
Mystery shopping can be a powerful thing, but sometimes you need blatant evidence to rely on. This is where video shops come in handy. With today’s technology, a camera can be anything from a phone to a button on a shirt. Video shops allow you to watch the shop like you would watch a movie. Body language, attitude and appearance are things that camera shops are best at documenting.
Intercept Interviews
Intercept Interviews are conducted face to face immediately after a customer has patronized a specific location, event or used a service. Our intercept interviewers complete a survey while having a conversation with your customers about your business. Using this type of survey drives the level of interaction up, therefore getting better responses from surveys conducted other ways.
Merchandising
Service Sleuth can execute merchandising tasks including stocking, inventory counting and product removal. Please call for more details on our merchandising capabilities.
Customer Service Training
Because some clients feel that mystery shopping companies could be motivated to provide results to promote more customer service training than needed, HS Brands chooses to avoid this conflict and refer all customer service training to Brad Worthley International. Brad Worthley is an internationally acclaimed customer service and leadership consultant.
