How Often Should You Secret Shop?

How often should you conduct secret shops? The frequency of your mystery shopping program directly impacts its effectiveness.

The answer is, there is no magic or perfect number. It really depends on your goals and the level of your staff’s sales skills. When you begin a mystery shopping program, it’s often a good idea to conduct shops at least once, often twice, per month.

The frequency also should depend on if you’re shopping each employee, or just shopping the self storage location. If you intend to shop the location, then two shops per month would be ideal. If you shop each employee, then one shop per month per employee should give your staff adequate training and perspective.

While shopping too much can be overkill, not shopping enough may be a waste of time. Shopping your facility once or twice per year may not allow your employees enough familiarity with the program to put it to use. Shopping so infrequently removes the secret shopping program’s ability to measure improvement as best as it could. Self storage owners should also consider turnover in between shops. Because of high turnover, secret shoppers may be shopping different employees each year, which makes the shop less effective.

The best way to determine how often you should mystery shop your store is to begin a secret shopping program with monthly shops and build a good relationship with your mystery shopping provider. Discuss with your provider what your goals are for the program and ask them what they’ve seen work or what hasn’t worked. Your mystery shopping provider has a lot of experience and can offer you good advice that will make your secret shopping program most effective.

Written by Sarah Little TQA Account Executive

Thanks for reading our self storage blog. We offer call center, secret shopping and sales training to the self storage industry.

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Disclamer: This entry is intended to promote our partner StorageMart and some or all participants received compensation.

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