How Secret Shoppers Can Put Your Employees to the Test

Nothing is worse than spending marketing and advertising dollars to draw customers into your business only to have them lost by unequipped or unfriendly associates in the store. What can you do as a business owner to protect your investment?

First of all, your employees should receive constant training. Simply giving putting new-hires through a week or two of orientation will not do the trick. Some business owners consider continuous training to be an unnecessary or added expense. This is the wrong way to go about looking at the cost of training. Consider it an investment into your business. Who are the people you rely on to close the sale or interact with your clients and customers? These are the people you are responsible for. You're responsible for giving them the tools they need to do a great job, and for encouraging them and boosting morale to keep doing a great job.

The first thing you may think of is, "How much is this going to cost me"? The answer depends on the program you put in place. If you half-heartedly throw together a worksheet or two or send out an email, the effect will be dismal and the cost exponentially more because you are missing out on revenue from customers who couldn't be helped.

A great training program relies partly on some sort of teaching and feedback system. Many businesses find that secret shopping your staff is a great way to create a little competition among employees and boost the morale of the whole. The trick to implementing a mystery shopping program that your employees care about is to get their buy in by tying a little bonus or incentive into the mix.

By no means does this mean you are shelling out thousands of dollars to one employee for scoring well on a secret shop. But, if they do the job, reward them accordingly. Setting up an employee bonus structure based on secret shopping scores lets your team know that you are serious about the program and want them to be as well. That said, you should take into consideration their salary ranges because you can't offer a $10 incentive to employees who make that much in an hour - the buy in would be very minimal. Give them something to really strive for. Consider giving them the equivalent of an entire day's pay for the monthly bonus or even a week's worth of pay.

A salary guide or employees bonuses is not the only factor to consider when setting your incentive program. Take into account the average cost of your sales. If each customer is worth $1,200 to you, then giving away that much in total incentives is well worth the gain of the customers your employees will be able to bring in. If you train a team of 20 and give away $1,200 in incentives, those 20 people are likely to have brought in anywhere from 5-11% increase over the same month last year. This, of course, is a general number and many variables of your industry and business will factor into this number. However, you can quickly see the value of training your staff to be knowledgeable in their areas of expertise.

The way to implement a great secret shopping program is to find the vendor that fits and understands your business goals, developing a smart incentive program and following it through each month.

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