Mystery Shopping Club

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Mystery Shopping Club

Getting paid to shop!

What is Mystery Shopping?

Mystery shopping is known by many names. Secret Shopping, Performance Evaluations, Service Monitoring, Anonymous Customers, Quality Auditing, Service Investigations, Trained Consumers, Service Checks and Frontline Evaluations to name a few.

Mystery shopping, by any name, is an evaluation of the shopping / buying process provided by trained researchers who know in advance what they are to evaluate. Mystery shoppers/researchers visit or call businesses posing as ordinary customers and provide detailed evaluations of their experience using written reports or questionnaires.

Mystery shopping provides companies with a means of monitoring service from the consumers?’ perspective. It gives management the ability to be the proverbial ''fly on the wall.'' Mystery shopping is used in a wide variety of industries such as retail, manufacturing, hospitality (hotels, restaurants, resorts), property management, multi-family housing, banking/financial, petroleum and c-store, entertainment, travel, utilities, business-to-business, even medical.

Mystery shopping is not new. Mystery shopping got its start over 50 years ago as a way to check on employee integrity and minimize theft primarily in the financial services industry. For several decades now, companies have been using mystery shopping to evaluate employee service and sales performance, monitor pricing and product quality, keep an eye on the competition and ensure compliance with industry and government regulations. Today many progressive companies integrate mystery shopping with employee training / incentive programs and customer satisfaction measurement.

For companies in competitive industries where product pricing and assortment are no longer unique selling propositions, customer service is often the key to success or failure.

If you are interested in becoming a mystery shopper there are hundreds of companies that provide mystery shopping services. A few of them, such as National Shopping Service allow you to apply online -- http://www.nationalsoppingservice.com