Tips for Starting a Successful Business

Preparing Your Store For Secret Shoppers: Tips For You

28 May 2020 by Brianna Cole

If your franchise or business has recently enrolled in a secret shopper program, meaning a secret shopper or shoppers will come to your store and evaluate your performance, you may be feeling anxious and apprehensive. After all, you want to do well so that people will enjoy coming to your store location. And if you are a manager of a corporate location, you want to look good and impress your superiors. There are several ways that you can prepare your store for secret shoppers. Get to know a few tips to help you out and you will be sure that you are ready to impress the secret shoppers and pass your secret shopper business evaluation with flying colors. 

Retrain Your Employees on Policy and Best Practices

When you find out that there will be secret shoppers in your store at some point, it is the time to step up and retrain your employees. Schedule training sessions for employees (paid sessions, of course) where they will go back through the training modules they did to start their job, particularly those modules related to safety and customer service. 

Make sure they know all of the company policies and best practices like the back of their hands. You may want to have mini-training sessions at the beginning of each shift. These mini-trainings can involve a short reminder of a policy or something your employee should do with each customer interaction. For example, if there is a specific greeting they are expected to give customers who walk in the door, remind them of that. 

Do Practice Runs

One way to train your employees to be prepared for a secret shopper to come in the store is to do a test run and evaluate everyone yourself. Have a friend come in and act as a "secret shopper." They will have a list of things to watch for and an area to comment on customer service and overall experience. 

Take this friend's evaluation and use it as a training opportunity for your employees if any mistakes or missteps were made. You can do this several times with different friends or family members if you want to be sure that your employees are ready. Also, plan to have these visits from friends or family acting as secret shoppers occur when you are in the back office or not at the store. That way, you can find out how your employees do when you are not around. 

Now that you know some of the ways you can prepare your store for a secret shopper business evaluation, you can start preparing your employees right away. 

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