Mystery shops--a rant

[Dreamstalker]

OK, a bit of a rant regarding mystery shops. Our store is small, probably the smallest in the area. As such, we don't have actual staffed departments for some stuff (floral, pharmacy), just displays/aisles. The building is pretty old--from the 70's--and as such has some physical/cosmetic issues that nobody can do anything about because Corp doesn't want to spend the money. Floors are a disaster? The sand the town dictates we must use in the winter tears up the tiles, after a certain point waxing no longer helps. The ceiling in the locker room has a big-ass hole in it.

I was in the other day to work on a project I had proposed, and got a peek at our mystery shop checklist. Scores of 0 on a lot of stuff that is beyond our control at the store level (ultimately, there's a scheduling/staffing problem).

"Associate was available for help in bake shop"...unless the bakery manager is in, we may not even have anyone behind the counter as we don't have enough people trained for bakeshop. All we can do is page someone and hope that whoever responds is trained in cake decorating/using the bread slicer.

"Associate was available for help in florist"...we don't have a florist department. The only thing we can do is page someone to the display.

"Associate was available in the aisles to help customer"...Not our problem if you don't know what our uniform looks like. I've seen mystery shoppers ask vendor reps for help (and then, predictably, give a low score because the poor Goya rep didn't know where the Lean Cuisine flatbread whatever was).

"Associate led customer to the product"...I don't know about anyone else, but personally I'm a bit put off by someone leading me exactly where X is in a grocery store (the way I see it, it wastes the employee's time). Get me within 5 feet and I'll be fine. As we're understaffed in general, at times if I'm asked where something is I can't drop everything (helping another customer or three, on my way to the backroom with hands full of something messy, cleaning up a spill which per policy I cannot leave until the area is dry). If I can do this I will (I always do for disabled customers), but for obvious product like pasta or cereal a general direction should be sufficient for the average customer.

We're supposed to be 'meeting and greeting' every customer that comes within...I think it's 3 feet. So if there are two of us in the same aisle we're both supposed to ask the customer if they need help. I don't think anyone really does this...it seems silly to ask 'do you need help finding something' when the customer is already deciding on pasta sauce.

There was 7 pages of this nonsense, but I only got to glance at the first sheet.

[Raveni]

Without getting into fratching...

The biggest problem with many mystery shopping services is that the standards that are given to them are different than the standards that are given to the store. If "associate led customer to product" is important to corporate, you would hope that you would learn about that standard long before reading about it on a mystery shop report pinned up in a back-room office.

At Grocery Store, every single store got bad reports every single time, and it was management's job to decide which parts of the report were actually things that were under our control and fix it.

[XCashier]

If "associate led customer to product" is important to corporate, you would hope that you would learn about that standard long before reading about it on a mystery shop report pinned up in a back-room office.

If "associate led customer to product" is important to corporate, they should bloody well give the stores enough hours to assure that there are enough employees on the floor to do just that! They cut our hours to the bone and then complain that we aren't "giving good customer service".

[Dreamstalker]

Probably should have put this in Fratching to begin with

Us worker bees never get to know what needs improving (often, the shop reports aren't even up on the board; I got lucky in looking at it). If I'm told 'we need to improve' I like to know what.

I can ID a lot of our mystery shoppers by now; they're too specific in what they're asking (and/or use terminology that only an employee should know). They also pick the most inopportune time to ask for help (if the front end is too crowded, I can't walk them to an item as I can't really move).

[kpzra]

I've been on both ends, I used to mystery shop grocery stores before I worked at one. They things we were supposed to judge came from corporate and some were STUPID. The store I worked at would post the results which had the score, name of employee, and what they were judged on. We'd know if "Jim" was very helpful in produce but "Mary" was rude when asked for a sample in the deli. It would even have a place to mark if cashiers checked bottom of basket/cart "(BoB) and asked if they needed help out. It was nice that the store didn't try to hide anything. Of course a perfect score also got you a $5 gift card, every 10 was $25 and so on.

[CoffeeMonkey]

My store used to use mystery shops until they switched to a survey-only evaluation. I think the IDEA of a mystery shop is very good. Send someone in to see if your employees are courteous, knowledgable, and trying to upsell your products (if applicable.) Good times. Except the corporate expectations are rediculous, and want things that normal customers do not.

Were you greeted within 10 seconds of coming into the store? Did the employee use these specific buzzwords when describing the promo item? Did they try to upsell a SPECIFIC bakery item? Did you get your drink within 2 minutes? Did the barista announce your drink BY NAME? And it was all max points or zero points, so you couldn't get partial credit. AND there was no way to disput the score, so if the shopper said you didn't say thank you, then no thank you points for you. AND they only come once a month. You only get in trouble if you personally fail the shop, but the store still gets in trouble in general.

We had the same shopper a few times, but even if it was a new person, if you were good, you had a pretty good shot at figuring them out partway through the transaction based on what and how they ordered. Also, they were usually female, and almost always middle aged or older. And they always sat down for awhile, with a book or some other thing to hide their note sheet, and always went to the bathroom. So it technically defeats the purpose of a MYSTERY shop, since you knew to kiss ass, but I never felt bad about it, since the thing was so unreasonable to start with.

If I ever get to run my own store, I will use mystery shoppers. I will have them come frequently, at all hours of operation. I will NOT be putting foolishly specific items, and I will be allowing partial credit. I want to know more general things. "Were you greeted promptly when you reached the counter?" "Were the employees polite and friendly throughout your transaction?" And probably most importantly: "If you had an issue, or a mistake was made, did the employees fix it?" I'm not interested in penalizing my employees for making the occasional honest mistake. I want to know that they are putting effort into providing quality service to my customers.

[Dreamstalker]

Exactly. Secret shoppers can be good tools if used correctly (emphasis on 'correctly'). Offer constructive criticism, not just "you didn't do this". Reports should be tailored to stores as appropriate from the beginning. If Corporate knows that Store X doesn't have certain items or departments, leave those questions off the shop for Store X (I don't mean just an 'n/a' on the final report, omit it entirely).

I think that calling out individual employees on what they did wrong is a very bad idea. I'm the kind of person where if I do make a mistake I don't want to be beat over the head with how I screwed up, I want to know how I can fix it (or just what not to do). Negative reinforcement does not work.

[Android Kaeli]

When I was working at Taco Hell way back when, we had people who would do the secert shops and often it was a couple of times a month if not more. By the time I eventually left there a year or so later, I could point out about 95% of them. Majority didn't even stand out as doing as such, but I could still tell who was a secert shopper and who was just someone coming in for a taco or two. Always in the lobby, rarely had one come through the drive-thru.

While we weren't always perfect, the GM and higher rarely came down on us if we fudged something. I think it was more the area I was working in or whatever, but the higher ups in the district knew that we weren't drones and were capable of making mistakes and couldn't always do it right. They just gave a friendly nudge, kept us pretty much in line, and made sure that while we made had area's of improvement, we still got praise for the things we did RIGHT.

[Gurndigarn]

My (arcade) company did mystery shops for a while, until they realized that they were spending money they didn't need to. I scored a 5% on one. My boss and I spent time trying to figure that out-- he knows I'm a much better employee than that-- until we realized the shopper came in at 7:30 on a Saturday, when I was having staffing issues and had worked open to close by myself since Thursday that week. Thursday, by the way, was 6 AM to 9:30 PM.

Once we figured out what had happened, I never heard another word about it. And we never got another mystery shopper after that.

[anyanka2]

The department store I work for has been pushing us to hand out forms for online customer feedback. I'm not the biggest supporter of that because I know most of the time the ones we get are not ones that are constructive. Either we get the ones from people who already have a chip on their shoulder about something or from associates' church members/family member/friends who have nothing but gushing praise for them. To me, those examples aren't useful because the comments go from the negative to the super positive.

We have gotten a couple neutral ones that have had some good comments in them. Granted, those are areas that the associates know are problems (scheduling someone in an area that they aren't familiar with, checking for ink tags, not having enough people scheduled), but it's nice that corporate reads them and hopefully communicates down to the store level that some changes need to be made.

[cashierbex]

First and only mystery shopper I had to deal with was when I first started working for the store. I actually helped get the store get a 100% in the longest time. I think we had another since then, but after that it stopped. Yes, a 16 year old (age back then) can give customer service on her first month at the job.