The Effectiveness Of Secret Shopping

Many firms are hiring secret shopping agents to provide them with feedback regarding their retail or storage personnel performance. This helps the firms in understanding the strengths and lacunae of their frontline staff. This method of evaluation is seen to be pretty effective in comparison to other methods of taking consumer and executive feedback. Earlier, surveys were conducted to know the consumer tastes and the consumers had to fill up feedback forms. Many consumers would simply march off the stores due to lack of time and more than that due to unwillingness to put in that extra effort to patiently pen down what they feel about their experiences. The forms were lengthy and pretty boring.

The secret shopping agents would make the feedback process very lively for the client. In the first place they would make the environment informal and extract information from them posing as fellow clients. Due to this, the real consumers would open up freely and voice their opinions. Hence this method of collecting vital information about consumer satisfaction seems to be very effective. This method reminds one of olden times when kings would send their agents or they would go out in disguise to get an understanding of what is happening in their kingdom.

When it comes to evaluating the property management or storage staff members, collecting information via secret shopping agents seems to be a very good method. Earlier there were boss and supervisor meetings where the boss would take reports about the performance of his sales staff from the supervisors. The supervisors would take a formal interview of the staff members to know their strengths and weaknesses. The members of the staff would not voice their opinions freely because of the fear of getting a negative evaluation. Hence, their problems would remain for years together unsolved and their performance would not make any progress.

Prior to appointing secret shopping agents, the top ranking bosses would go on periodic inspections to evaluate the quality of the performance of their frontline staff and the consequent consumer satisfaction. But the disadvantage out there was, the staff being already aware of the inspection would put on a show of perfection in front of their bosses and get back to their usual performance standards after he left the scene. So this method also turned out to be an ineffective way of getting the correct picture of the performance of the frontline staff.

The secret shopping agents, by posing as consumers, gave the opportunity of free expression to the frontline staff along with the consumers. The staff members unaware of any evaluation that is going on openly tell the agents what they feel about their employment with the firm, their seniors , the things that they are pleased about and the ones that displease them in their careers.

Apart from talking directly to the frontline staff members and the consumers, the agents also make direct observations of the activities at a retail outlet. They observe the maintenance aspects of the business venue they visit. They pay surprise visits to the malls and hence catch all the actions out there in its true colors. These agents are hence akin to spies. However, the purpose of such a mission is not to catch the frontline staff red handed and penalize them, but to identify the strong points and weak points of a system to facilitate further progress.

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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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