Receipts:

Receipts are required for any shop that involves a purchase. The receipt area of a shop report will always require both an itemized copy as well as proof of tip and it’s important to capture the location address, and time and date stamp. The receipt question will always ask you to provide the total spent and the items purchased.

Photos:

Photos are becoming more and more common as visuals are a great way for our clients to view the product they are putting out, any cleanliness issues within their establishment, etc. We receive a lot of inquiries from shoppers regarding being weary of taking photos in a busy setting, but the reality is that in this day and age, it is very common for patrons to take photos of their food and post them to one of their socials. While a shopper may feel a little uncomfortable taking them, our clients understand the situation and still want and need the very valuable visuals these photos provide.

Audio:

While audio files aren’t as common, we do have a handful of clients that require audio as part of their shops. Audio is most often obtained using one’s phone, but any device that can capture a recorded conversation will suffice. You must make sure that your device is hidden, yet not covered to the point it muffles the sound. You should never be concerned about the legality of recording the conversation as our clients are aware that the burden is on them to ensure their employees understand there is a possibility they will be recorded.

Screenshots:

Screenshots are most often required within our phone and email inquiry shops. Clients are looking for proof that shoppers reached out when they say they did, so they can verify the date and time data within their internal systems. Each device captures screenshots in a different way and it’s important to make sure you are aware of how to do so; a simple Google search can usually provide you with an answer.

Helpful Tips:

Taking Photos: While the iSS app will allow you to take photos in real-time and attach them to your report, we do recommend using your phone’s camera feature to acquire the photos so that if there is a glitch in the iSS app, the photos will be impossible to retrieve. However, if you take them with your phone’s camera, they are easier to recover, should there be any issue.

Format: Photos should always be saved in JPEG format and audio files should always be saved in a WAV format.

Geo Tagging: Ensuring that you have location services turned on when taking photos and uploading them to your report will prevent any location errors from occurring.

We understand that attaching additional photos, files, etc. to your shop report can be challenging if you aren’t used to doing so, but it is usually a simple process regardless of the device you are using. Don’t hesitate to contact the Shopper Help Desk should you have any questions about this or anything else you may be unsure of regarding the successful completion and submission of your shop reports.

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There are many different types of banking and financial intuition shops that we conduct for our clients such as phone, email and web inquiries, teller interactions and a more in-depth personal banker shop. Within these shop types, there are many different scenarios that are played out including but not limited to, new and existing account inquiries, a variety of personal and small business loan and financing inquiries, along with standard teller services.

For a banking or financial institution shop, the shop generally requires more preparation than a standard mystery shop. There is most often a scenario that the shopper must follow, and becoming familiar with certain terminology and verbiage associated with the financial world is pivotal for a successful shop. For example, if the shop instructions indicate that the shopper must inquire about a small business loan, they must prepare the appropriate background information to be ready for any questions that may be asked of them by the rep such as the name and size of the business, the location of the business, and the amount they are looking to borrow. If a shopper is faced with these questions and isn’t prepared to provide relevant answers, the shop’s status becomes compromised as any delay or uncertainty in their responses will raise a red flag with the rep. While we will never ask you to provide any of your sensitive, personal information; it is vital that you have made up a back story that goes along with the scenario you are playing out.

These shops can vary significantly and it’s important that the shopper is always reading through all the instructions and requirements prior to accepting the shop. Some banking shops require the shopper to already be a member of the bank, and some specifically ask that they are not.  The phone inquiries most often involve a recorded call element making it all the more important to ensure the shopper is prepared to answer any questions they are asked as the recorded file is being sent directly to the client.   A lot of the phone, email, and web inquiry shops typically involve some back and forth, and awaiting follow up and it’s important to make sure you are updating your shop report along the way, so your scheduler knows that the shop is being actively worked.

These types of shops are often very popular among shoppers as there is no money spent out of pocket, making them straight-profit shops. If you are interested in learning more about these shops or are interested in being scheduled for these shops, please don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know.

The post Spotlight: Banking and Financial Institution Shops appeared first on Retail Audit Pro.

Randi was hired right out of college to help build and run the Retail Compliance Auditor division of Goodwin Hospitality (our former company name). Little did she know that she was about to begin a long and successful journey here. With an endless work ethic, attention to detail, and tremendous pride in everything she does, Randi has continually solidified her unofficial title as “the one that keeps the trains running on time.”

From company strategy to hiring/training/managing our team to sales and execution, Randi makes her mark on just about everything we do as a company each day. Most of our clients are unaware of her direct impact on their programs so I wanted to take this opportunity to recognize her loyalty and achievements and express my sincere gratitude for all her contributions over the years.

Randi’s knowledge base in the Retail Compliance Auditor world is second to none. She has helped to create and run programs in virtually every industry across all company sizes, with a wide variety of use cases. She has always worked hard to cultivate relationships with our shopper community while being fair and holding our shoppers accountable for a high level of performance on behalf of our clients’ best interests – Not an easy task! Randi has also invested the time to truly master the Prism reporting dashboard system, constantly finding new ways to deliver valuable insights to our clients, as well as streamline internal tasks.

Additionally, as our company has grown and changed over the years, she has adapted and responded to every challenge with professionalism and grace. Her willingness to step outside her comfort zone and try new things has helped propel us forward as a team. Personally, she has been a big asset to me and my own development over the years that I’ve been here, and we have built a great partnership together. I look forward to many more years ahead.

We wouldn’t be the company we are today without Randi – Thank you for everything you do for us!

-Kurt Eddins, President

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*Question Set

The questions on your form are the top priority in the formation of your shop template. Think about what you are looking to measure; steps of service, service timing, product and food quality, cleanliness, management presence, etc. – whatever it is that made you decide to put a shop program in place in the first place. Identify what you are focusing on in your staff training and what you want to hold them accountable to.

*Question Phrasing

The way you phrase the questions is also important; while you may have internal verbiage that makes sense to you and your team, you want to word the questions in a way that will make sense to the shopper. You also want to be as definitive as possible. For example, don’t just ask, ‘Was your food delivered in a timely manner’; define what timely means to you and your team, ‘Was your food delivered within eight minutes’.

*Question Types and Answer Options

The majority of questions on your shop’s form should be objective; questions that have a definitive answer and don’t involve opinion. We recommend having a few subjective questions within your form as the comments can provide actionable feedback, but only placing scores on questions that don’t involve a shopper’s opinion. This aids in consistent scoring across your shops, which makes the data and reporting steadier and more reliable. It’s also important to think about answer options; if it’s a black-and-white question, you should use a Yes|No or Agree|Disagree scale. For questions with the potential for some grey area, you should use a sliding scale such as 1-5, or Agree|Somewhat Agree|Neutral|Somewhat Disagree|Disagree.

*Comments

Text responses provide great feedback; our recommendation is to always force a comment when a question is answered negatively, and to always include a summary at the end of each section which provides a short narrative covering all the questions asked in a given section.

*Scoring and Weighting

We recommend focusing on what’s most important to your business and your brand and making those questions worth more of the overall score. Our scoring system works as an overall average of points achieved divided by the points possible, not an average of averages, meaning that the individual point values are not as important as the weighting scale that you choose.

*Photos and other Attachments

Most of our clients take advantage of the photo attachment feature within the system. If you choose to require photos for your shops, it’s important to let us know exactly how we should instruct our shoppers to take the photos; from what angle, what depth perception, what size, etc.

While it can take a few rounds of revisions to get the template set up correctly, it is time well spent to ensure your form is set up to capture the exact data and feedback that is most important to your business. We are always willing to make changes along the way, and we understand that the focus of the shop may change.  However, we do recommend keeping the form as consistent as possible as it’s much more valuable to track the same data points month after month versus constantly changing the data set you are evaluating. There are a lot of factors that go into getting your template set up for success, and as always, our client team is here to assist in whatever way they can.

The post Mystery Shop Report Best Practices appeared first on Retail Audit Pro.

As discussed in the piece, Mark Ang had one sole focus from the beginning of this entrepreneurial career: upholding his promises to his clients. As a small operation with a limited number of customers, that means one thing. Yet, if you expand to a larger size and scope, then it becomes more difficult to measure and monitor the customer experience. That is where a Retail Audit Pro Retail Compliance Auditor program can step in and help.

Any organization can say they are customer-focused, but without a consistent strategy to monitor daily operations, it is not possible to properly evaluate if all promises are being kept. Our shoppers can assess any interaction, including online, phone calls, or in-person, to verify if customers are being treated well throughout the process.

Using Retail Compliance Auditor data, companies can be proactive in their understanding of the customer experience, rather than seeing a drop in sales and wondering why that may be the case. Additionally, companies can shop their competition and compare the experience, so they know what they may be up against.

Contact us today to learn more about how Retail Compliance Auditor can help support your organization’s customer experience goals.

The post Customer Obsession Leads to Growth appeared first on Retail Audit Pro.

Quality Assurance is one of the most vital pieces of the mystery shop process. Every single shop that comes through our system is touched by a quality assurance representative before the report is delivered to the end user.  We have built a team of editors who work seven days a week to ensure that shop reports are being sent to our clients within a 24-hour timeframe from when they are submitted.

Our team of editors is trained to look out for myriad things when they are reviewing and assessing shop reports. Those items include:

• Shop Validity: Ensuring that the shopper has visited the location they were assigned, purchased the required items, tipped appropriately if applicable, conducted the shop on the assigned date and within the allotted timeframe and followed all basic instructions and guidelines outlined in the shop details. They do this by verifying a legitimate receipt which needs to include all of these pertinent details.

• Grammar and spelling: Our editors comb through each report to ensure the reports are grammatically sound, are written in the past tense, and that proper sentence structure is used throughout the report.

• Score and Comment Agreement: The comments written throughout a shop report must reflect the answers and scores the shopper has logged. Our editors ensure that any score, and specifically any negative experience, is properly explained within the report and thus our editors are checking for any inconsistencies or contradictions.

• Quality Narratives: Our editors read each comment within a report to ensure that the final product will make sense to the client receiving it. While we never change the sentiment of what our shoppers are stating occurred on their shop, we do take the step of rewording it in a different way to make sure it’s clear and provides appropriate constructive feedback.

• Photo and File Authenticity: The software system that houses all of our mystery shop data has a built-in fraud checker that catches the vast majority of any falsified photo and receipt attachments. Our editors take the extra step of looking into these fraud alerts to ensure that the client doesn’t receive anything that appears questionable.

Our quality assurance reps work directly with shoppers in regard to missing data or discrepancies within their shop reports and provide hard deadlines to resubmit if something is amiss with their report. When a shopper has not performed a shop correctly, or up to our standard, we decline the report and note the shopper’s account. If a shopper consistently fails to complete shops properly, we deactivate them from our system so that they are no longer eligible for shops with our company.

At the end of the day, the main objective for our quality assurance team is to ensure that the reports we deliver to our clients add value to their business. Our clients need to have trust and confidence in what we are delivering to them, and the quality assurance team is a key piece of the process that makes that possible.

The post Quality Assurance Process appeared first on Retail Audit Pro.

The first step is a discovery call with our President, Kurt Eddins, to determine your program goals and spec out what you want the shops to look like. From there, you will receive a proposal with a full breakdown of the pricing and schedule as well as our deliverables and terms under the agreement. You may also schedule a follow-up meeting with him to review the proposal and receive a live demo of the reporting dashboard as well.

Once the proposal is agreed upon and signed, there are several key items that need to be reviewed and taken care of before we can begin to post shops:

1. Report templates – You will be provided with standard templates for your industry that you may mark up with changes (either on paper and scanned or within Excel, Adobe, etc.) and send back to us. Our team will then make the requested changes and send them back to you for final approval.
2. Locations – We need the addresses, phone numbers, and preferred names for all locations, as well as any hierarchy associated (regions, districts, etc.)
3. Users – Who would you like to receive the emailed shop reports for which location(s)? We can also give people access to the dashboard without receiving the emails.
4. Invoice recipient(s) – We can include up to 2 people on the monthly invoice emails.
5. Payment method – We accept checks as well as automatic credit card or ACH processing. For smaller groups, we can accommodate billing for each location if necessary.
6. Start date – Give us the final green light to begin!

Once we have everything finalized, our Client Help Desk team will officially “post” the first round of shops to the system. Typically, you will have your first shop completed within a week or two, depending on the shop type and location. This is what happens next from there:

1. Kurt will follow up with you to ensure you received the first report and make sure it didn’t go to your spam or junk folder (this happens periodically).
2. At this time, you will also be provided with your login information to the dashboard and our user guide so you can begin to navigate your way around.
3. Shop report emails come from clienthelpdesk@360-relay.com – This is also a shared inbox internally for our team, so please feel free to respond directly to this email with questions or day-to-day needs related to the program.
4. You may communicate with Kurt regarding partnership-level concerns or questions about the pricing or agreement. If you reach out to him directly requesting template changes, new users to be added, or things along these lines, he will likely forward your message to the Client Help Desk for resolution. As long as all details are provided, your request will be handled very quickly.

We take immense pride in the support we provide for all clients. Our focus is always on flexibility, transparency, speed, and quality to ensure that you are receiving the maximum return on investment from your program with us.

Successful onboarding requires good communication and involvement from both parties – After a month or two shops, you may see that changes are needed. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions in this process.

The post Client Onboarding: What to Expect appeared first on Retail Audit Pro.

At Retail Audit Pro, we’ve seen a wide variety of approaches when it comes to taking the data and leveraging it for growth and success. You can implement bonus and training programs based on the shop scores and create company buy-in using other methods as well.

In this post, we’d like to focus on a specific feature that is available within our reporting dashboard (at no additional cost) that can be used to generate follow-up actions based on individual reports: The Compliance Module

The compliance module is an optional tool that can be toggled on and off in your program by communicating with our team. Here’s how it works:

• Once a report is approved that needs action – log in to Dashboard >> Hover over Mystery Shop >> Select COMPLIANCE
• Reports that require action or follow-up are indicated by a RED X
• Use the EYE ICON to select the report needing a comment
• Under the Section Scores on the report you are viewing, any assigned users can comment on the next steps. When a comment is added, it will send a message to everyone on the report distribution.
• Others can participate in the exchange and once Management is satisfied that the proper actions have been taken, they can click Clear Compliance Requirement and change the icon to Green.

This tool gives our clients the ability to create tasks for their team and track them until they are resolved. Whether it is a light bulb that needs to be changed or a staff issue that needs to be addressed, the compliance module provides the organized and flexible framework that is necessary.

Did I mention it’s free? Contact us today to learn more!

The post How To Create Action with Retail Compliance Auditor appeared first on Retail Audit Pro.

With this in mind, we have recently taken a look at a group of 18,038 shops (we chose to exclude some outliers) that were completed in the first half of 2022 in order to pull together some statistics that may help with understanding what a good mystery shop score is.

Data Summary:

• Industry breakdown-
  • Roughly 60% hospitality
  • Roughly 15% retail
  • Roughly 15% fitness
  • Remaining 10% across automotive, colleges, movie theaters, and several others
• Some clients allow bonus points, making the highest possible score above 100%
• Reports ranging in length from 10 questions up to 200+

Findings:

• The overall average score was 84.9%
• The median score was 89.8%
• The standard deviation was 15.99
• Count breakdown
  • 1,447 reports scoring less than 60 – 8%
  • 1,329 reports in the 60’s – 7.4%
  • 2,081 reports in the 70’s – 11.5%
  • 4,282 reports in the 80’s – 23.7%
  • 8,898 reports in the 90’s and above – 49.3%

Looking at these numbers, we think it is safe to say that any score below 80% should be considered sub-par, anything in the 80s should be considered average or good, and anything in the 90s should be considered excellent (relatively speaking).

We always urge our clients to meet with us and discuss their program parameters if they feel the shops are set up to be either too difficult or too easy for their teams. We can customize things such as:

• Instructions (emphasizing some aspects of the experience for shoppers to focus on)
• Number of questions (general recommendation in the 50-60 range)
• Question format (yes/no, agree/disagree, 1-5 scale, etc.)
• Point weighting for each question (can either be all the same or different)

The shop requirements should ideally match up with everything the team is trained to deliver, so they know what they are being tested on. Because this varies from business to business, this can make it a little more challenging to do overall benchmarking, but we hope that these statistics from the first half of 2022 might help give you some guidance, nonetheless.

Please contact us if you’d like to set up a program with us, or if you are an existing client and would like to discuss your shop scores.

The post What is a good mystery shop score? appeared first on Retail Audit Pro.

Our clients rely on guest feedback through Retail Compliance Auditor as an extremely important part of their culture and mystery shop data directly impacts how they make decisions about products, service standards, promotions, training, and a plethora of other areas of their business. Understanding the role that a Retail Compliance Auditor plays is critical so that you can understand how the feedback you provide in a mystery shop report directly affects our client’s businesses.

Below are some examples of where your feedback goes, and how it influences and impacts our clients:

Training, Hiring, and Firing:

Many clients use mystery shop reports as a training tool to coach their staff on areas of opportunity. For example, a common point that many clients monitor is their team’s ability to upsell. It’s important to understand what constitutes an upsell and how to properly gauge if the employee is offering it in the proper manner. If an employee regularly fails to promote an upsell to a customer, or if a location consistently fails to do so, it may result in the dismissal of an employee or even a manager who may not be properly training his staff in proper upselling techniques.  This may lead to an employee needing to be replaced, resulting in new hires and updated training programs to ensure the issue doesn’t persist.

Bonus Programs:

On the flip side of using Retail Compliance Auditor as a tool to reprimand employees, many clients use their shop program as a piece of their employee bonusing programs. Employees rely heavily on these bonuses. It’s important that the feedback provided is accurate, so the deserving employees are bonused appropriately.

Product Feedback:

Clients will often utilize specific Retail Compliance Auditor to gain insight into new products they are testing and considering putting into rotation. They are looking for honest opinions and insight into their new products as they know that even a small sample will provide them with a base of understanding as to how their new products will fare if released.

Franchise Compliance:

Clients structured in a franchise model will often use their Retail Compliance Auditor to ensure that their franchisees are in compliance with corporate standards. Are their franchisees using company-branded logos? Are they promoting their loyalty program? Clients use this feedback to keep tabs on their franchisees making it vital that the feedback provided is precise.  

Your feedback matters and it’s crucial to understand why: your mystery shop reports directly impact the day-to-day operations of our clients which is why your reports must always be factual, accurate, and consistent.  Please don’t hesitate to reach out to our shopper help desk or to your scheduler if you ever need clarification on a shop requirement or have a question about the form. We want you to feel confident about your visit and the report you are providing.

The post Why Retail Compliance Auditor Feedback Matters appeared first on Retail Audit Pro.