On Tuesday, July 27, 2010 Confero, Inc. hosted a focus group of local mystery shoppers at our first ever Mystery Shopper Advisory Council meeting.  Our goals behind establishing this shopper council were to find out how we could improve our relationships with independently contracted mystery shoppers, learn about their views on the mystery shopping industry, and brainstorm for ideas on recruiting. 

Local mystery shoppers met with Confero staff members and participated in a round table discussion with our scheduling team.  We discussed a wide range of topics including, client guidelines, scheduling mystery shops, types of mystery shop assignments, and shop postings.

Labor Day has passed, signaling the end to another summer.  At Confero, this summer was a busy, successful one!  Our mystery shop programs included fast-food, casual and fine dining restaurants, amusement parks, movie theaters, airports, auto insurance inquiries, banking, convenience stores, jewelry stores, automotive oil changes, grocery stores, and health clubs.

Many of the programs were nationwide, so our independely contracted mystery shoppers across the country were able to participate in a wide-variety of mystery shops.

 
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Mystery shoppers must remember all sorts of client-required details to fill out their reports.  With pages of questions to answer and narratives to write mystery shoppers can use all the help they can get recreating their experience.

There's an app for that!  Shopper who have invested in Smartphone technology are at least one step ahead.  There are apps to take notes, pictures, videos, or auto recordings.  Most voice recorders have time stamps so coughing at the beginning and end of your shop can help determine how long it took.  Don't have a Smartphone? Can you text yourself?  How about just calling your voicemail; you can leave your cell phone on during your mystery shop and you'll have a full account when you get home. 

Beginning this month, Confero will begin our yearly Shopper Profile updates.  Mystery shoppers will be required to update their Shopper Profiles by January 1st, 2011 to continue mystery shopping with Confero.  Here are some highlights of the new updates:

Additional demographic questions including:

The Mystery Shopping Providers Association (MSPA) recently introduced a new forum, The Listening Post, for MSPA Silver and Gold Certified mystery shoppers.  The purpose of this forum is to allow MSPA certified mystery shoppers a place to network with other mystery shoppers, schedulers, editors, and company owners.  We hope that this forum will provide a place for open communication between all the vital people in our industry. 

This forum will allow certified mystery shoppers to forge professional relationships with schedulers and editors.  There are interactive message boards that allow for registered members to start threads and reply to topics.  There is also the opportunity to blog about topics of interest in the mystery shopping industry.  Registered members can also announce and plan events on the site.

The Listening Post is free to join.  Since this forum was recently launched, expect to see updates often!  Please register at www.mspashoppers.com.

We look forward to meeting you at The Listening Post.

Have you considered becoming a MSPA certified mystery shopper?  Mystery shopper certification has many benefits including:

You just got back from shopping three locations of the same client.  Each assignment used the same scenario, and they all went pretty much the same way.  The temptation is to write the comments and narrative for the first shop, then copy and paste your words into the other two reports.  A few changes of names and other details and you're done, right?

Wrong!  Although recycling is a good thing, recycling comments and narratives in your mystery shop reports is not.  Not only do some shoppers do this when they shop multiple locations of a company in the same day, they may copy and paste comments from shops done for the same client in previous months, or even shops done for competing businesses in the same industry.  I even heard about one shopper who copied and pasted comments from the sample report provided by the mystery shopping company. 

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