Setting up a Mystery Shopping Company?

cherryJ

Hello....just a thought that occurred to me so I thought I'd post on here to see what people think - what would the feasibility of setting up your own mystery shopping company be?

There's lots of small + independent type shops in my area so I wondered about the possibility of setting up your own mystery shopping company & approaching shops yourself to see if they were interested.

This is only a very vague idea and I guess there is probably lots of legislation etc involved & I doubt it is something I personally would end up doing but just wondered what people's thoughts were...?

Mags30

How small would this company be? If you were to approach the businesses yourself to sign them up as mystery shopping clients you can't go back and be the mystery shopper as they would know you!

Very small businesses might not be able to afford to pay for a mystery shopping service.

Anything's possibe though,, if you do set it up please post here so we can sign up to shop for you!

Bexm

I've actually thought about this.. not sure if the small local businesses would be able to afford it..
But I thought I could recruit my friends as most of us are mystery shoppers any way!

monkeymo

I would imagine that a small independent would need to have a number of different shops which they are unable to keep an eye on, to be interested in being mystery shopped. If I owned and ran a small shop, I'd be in it when it was open so I would know what the staff were doing. If I had 3 shops, I'd have to employ shop managers to run them so I would float between the 3 shops.

I reckon a small independent company would have to have enough shops for the owners to not know what is happening in the shops to be interested in mystery shoppers finding this out for them. I wonder what the cut-off point would be...

PasturesNew

You would need to know/understand what you were measuring and why. You'd need to word the feedback surveys correctly so you got data you can work with. Most companies employ mystery shoppers as a direct way to ensure staff who have been trained are still performing to company procedures ... and to identify any training/re-training that needs to be done; many mystery shopping companies are therefore booked by the training companies who undertake the staff training for the shops being visited (hope that made sense).

It's not random, it has to be meaningful, data has to be collated, reported on and action plans that come out of that need to be fed back into the company policy.

So there's a bit more to it than getting somebody to go eat a burger and report back if they got a tomato sauce sachet.