The Art of Secret Shopping

Any company that operates in the sales industry has a right to know that their salespeople are doing their job. Each salesperson cannot be supervised every minute they are on the clock, but taking a sampling of their sales pitches and interactions with customers is a valid and valuable way of checking up on them. The best way to get the sampling is through a process called secret shopping. Secret shopping allows for a controlled environment where the employee does not know he or she is being evaluated and will therefore perform in their normal level. Otherwise, if the employee knows he or she is being graded, they are likely to over-compensate their performance to get a good grade. In general, secret shopping is an excellent way of ensuring the total quality assurance of the business in question.

So how does secret shopping work? Secret shopping is actually a very straightforward procedure. In the self storage industry, a member of the secret shopping team makes a recorded phone call to a self storage facility. While on the phone with the self storage facility, the secret shopping team member will pretend they are a customer needing storage. They will let the manager or storage employee take control of the call and let the call run course. No hints or questions feeding the employee are allowed in order to truly grade the employee on an honest performance. Once the secret shopping team member feels the call has come to a natural conclusion, they would most likely come up with an excuse not to reserve a unit and end the phone call. Later another member of the secret shopping team will listen to the recorded call and begin grading the performance of the self storage employee.

The secret shopping team member grades the call based on many dimensions. The tone of the call is graded. Keeping a friendly tone with the caller is always important. After all you do attract more bees with honey than you do with vinegar. Order of phrases used in the call is also important. In the sales world, the price of what is being sold should always be handled last. Before price is given, usually some agreements should be reached with the customer. Let us say for storage that we want location, convenience, security, and size in agreement before we can get agreement for price. Basically, the customer will understand the price after they know everything else. After agreement is reached with the customer for the different aspects, it is then important to actually ask for the customer to commit to the unit (either by setting up a site visit to come the office and check things out and or by asking the customer to guarantee the unit with a reservation). The finishing touches of the call are graded as well. It is unprofessional to end the call without giving the customer the opportunity to ask additional question. So the wrap up of the secret shopping call should include gratitude for choosing that facility and then to ask for questions to give a final chance to clear anything up.

With the call recorded and graded, the person who was evaluated will get their secret shopping feedback on how well or how badly they did. This should provide highlights of what worked and what did not, but they should not think of it as negative. It is a critique to help them improve for the next time.

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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