The Marketplace of Shops & Shoppers

If your business is new to mystery shopping, you might be tempted to find the lowest-cost provider out there. But there are huge sacrifices in quality with bargain-basement providers.

As we’ve discussed before, cheaper services always prove to be more expensive in the end due to hidden costs of shoddy work, which is why we argue that quality trumps cost when it comes to mystery shopping.

Businesses should be familiar with two main concepts in the industry, the marketplace of shops and the marketplace of shoppers.

The Marketplace of Shops

Mystery shopping is conducted by many businesses across a multitude of industries. So in any town, there may be hundreds of mystery shops occurring on any day.

Thus, your assignments exist in a marketplace with many other assignments. And as with any other marketplace, there is competition.

Experienced customer service evaluators (aka, shoppers) sign up with many shopping companies, and receive many assignment offers every day.

So how do the shoppers decide which assignments to accept and which to refuse?

The best shoppers develop a keen understanding of the relative value of the assignments in their area, and they understand that some assignments offer better value (more money for the work) than others.

Consequently, talented shoppers will know immediately if your assignment is underpaying (in which case they will avoid it) or offering fair compensation (in which case they will accept it).

The Marketplace of Shoppers

Mystery shopping is an art, and some evaluators are simply better at it than others.

The best shoppers prepare thoroughly, act naturally, possess awesome observational skills, and write highly detailed reports.

When done well, a mystery shopping report can make you feel like you conducted the evaluation.  

But not all mystery shoppers are that good.

Your objective is to enter the marketplace of shoppers and make sure to get the best ones, as they will provide the best feedback, and consequently, the best input for improving your business.

But how do you that?

Setting the Price

Landing the best evaluators is simply a matter of offering competitive compensation relative to the other assignments in their area. It’s really that simple.

If you want the most talented and experienced shoppers accepting your assignments, offer enough compensation so that they recognize the superior value of your assignments.

The Consequences of Cutting Corners

Like any industry, cost is a major factor in mystery shopping.

Clients need to understand that the “savings” promised by cut-rate providers usually don’t stem from greater efficiency or know-how, but from offering less money to the shoppers.

But once you understand the marketplace of shops and the marketplace of shoppers, you quickly realize the gaping flaw in this plan.

Paying less on your assignments means that the best shoppers will avoid them, which means that your assignments will only be accepted by shoppers who are inexperienced or desperate enough to accept them.

Consequently, the quality of your reports drops, negating the program’s ability to actually improve your business.  

So keep in mind the marketplace of shops and the marketplace of shoppers, and your program should thrive.

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[Update: We received the following email from one of our readers/shoppers commening on this post:

• "Very nice article, Ziggy. I agree totally. I turned down a merchandising opportunity just yesterday because it was not even close to valuable to me. ME and TMG are the best when it comes helping clients set an appropriate value for the shopper to consider." -MM 

Thanks so much for the feedback!!! -ZZ]

Honest Survey Introduction

Know what drives me crazy? When companies invite you to take their "5-question" survey, but don't bother to tell you that each of the five questions actually has multiple components.

It's pure baiting-and-switching, and it often looks like this:

Q1. Please check whether you agree or disagree with the following statements:

• Statement 1
• Statement 2
• Statement 3
• Statement 4
• ...
• Statement 25

No one would seriously consider that to be one question. Usually, we think of a single online question as something that requires a single mouse click.

So I'm extending props to the folks at this political blog for being transparent in their survey request text.

Sure, it mentions that there are only "eight questions," and the first one looks like this:

But I want to point out that the FIRST WORDS of the invitation text read:

• "Can you spare us three or four minutes..."

They could have used the old bait-and-switch and slyly touted the survey as being just 8 (or 9) questions. Which is technically true, but it clearly requires more than 8 mouse clicks to complete. So that would have been misleading.

Instead, they detailed the time commitment upfront.

Nice work!

Did this Survey Make You Think Less of Us? (part 2 of the continuing tragedy)

I’ve picked on The Weather Channel before for poor survey design, but that hasn’t stopped them.

They’re back with an all new, eye-crossing questionnaire that’s more tedious than reading your iTunes user agreement backwards.

It’s hard to envision a person with (a) enough free time to take this monstrosity, and (b) enough self-loathing to make them persevere through questions such as:

• How does this site compare to your idea of an ideal website?

• How likely are you to use weather.com to provide information specific to your individual activities and hobbies beyond the weather you might typically expect from weather.com?

Still awake?

And, to make the whole thing perfectly absurd, they rely on 1-to-10 scales. (I’m trying to move beyond my disdain for 1-to-10 scales; I’ve belittled them enough; it’s time to let go and move on.)

You really have to see the survey for yourself to appreciate its daunting, mind-numbing qualities.

I would love to know how many people (like me) agreed to the survey, saw this thing pop up on their screen, and realized that it would be more fun to see how far you can stick a screw driver into your ear.

It’s worth saying again- surveys are communication pieces, and what people think about your survey will influence what they think about your overall brand.

• Bad surveys demonstrate poor communication skills.
• Bad surveys suggest that a company that is unaware of (or indifferent to) the customer experience.
• Bad surveys reflect a lack of respect for customers’ time and intelligence.
• Bad surveys…well, are just bad surveys.

Think about how hard The Weather Channel management probably scrutinizes every aspect of their brand, from the on-air personalities and their special programs, to their sponsors and their corporate giving. All of these things probably require a seal of approval that they maintain the company’s brand standards.

But somehow surveys have escaped being reviewed for standards.

Don’t get me wrong…I would never, ever want communications people in charge of survey design. That’s not their specialty.

But in this case, the researchers would have benefitted from someone reviewing and challenging their work before this survey became an unfortunate piece of the TWC’s overall brand.

Kudos!

We want to extend a huge “Congratulations!!!” to Trinity High School’s Broadcast Journalism class!!!

They recently won the Advertising Federation of Louisville’s 12^th Annual High School Marketing Challenge Competition.

Their challenge was to create a compelling campaign to increase awareness of the issue of teen obesity.

Click here to access their winning work.

We salute the students for confronting all of the challenges and complications that accompany the creation of a campaign, and for overcoming them to produce some fine pieces of work.

It was a delight to meet these students, and we we’d like to thank the fine people at Kertis Creative for introducing us to this ambitious crew.

Forest Fun!

Our team spent last Friday doing some gratifying (although definitely arduous) work at Jefferson Memorial Forest.

If you visit the welcome area, note the gorgeous (and somewhat heavy) mulch laboriously placed all around the parking lot.

Bask in the clean, well-kept garden beds that have been lovingly cleared of debris, weeds, and broken branches.

And definitely take note of the new Prairie Dropseed we hope will be thriving throughout the big rock wall.

We planted a whole tray of these, and the vision is that they will mature and soften up the look of the wall (see photo below…you can see one next to Zig’s right elbow). 

Afterwards, we spent a wonderful night in the park relaxing, grilling, and camping.

And we had nighttime visitors in the form of raccoons and (we’re pretty sure) a wild hog.

Huge thanks to Bennett, Sherry, and Brian for the wonderful day, and for taking great care of such a beautiful community resource.

When 3 is Greater Than 5

A while back, I was privileged to write a guest post for Vovici’s online research blog after an invitation from industry wizard Jeffrey Henning (he has since joined Affinnova).

While collaborating on a project, Jeffrey and I struck up a conversation on scales, and I mentioned that our company has had tremendous success replacing traditional 5-point scales with 3-point scales.

You can read the original article here, but the main arguments I make in advocating the 3-point scale are:

1. They are visually more appealing to respondents, and thus create more buy-in

2. They generate more variance than 1-5 scales (where ~90% of all respondents say 4 or 5)

3. They decrease response set

All three are important, but from a client’s viewpoint, the main advantage is that a 3-point scale allows us to distinguish between people who are perfectly satisfied with your product/service/brand from people who are REALLY enthusiastic about your product/service/brand.

And that’s crucial.

Interview respondents after they use a 5-point scale and you’ll hear some disconcerting comments that make you really question validity.

People who are extremely enthusiastic about your product/service/brand might only score it as a 4 and argue, “It’s terrific, but things can always be better than they are.”

Other people might assign a rating of 5; and when pressed for their reasoning, they’ll argue, “Well, things are fine; I have no complaints.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

In these two examples, you’d like the first person to have assigned a 5, and the second person to have assigned a 3.

I argue that the 3-point scale helps us improve our validity (though certainly not perfect it) by more accurately capturing respondents’ sentiments.

We’ll offer respondents options such as:

• Truly outstanding
• Perfectly acceptable
• Can use some improvement

A few things to note.

First, when using a 5-point scale, respondents with mild quibbles or complaints often feel like a score of 1, 2, or 3 is too harsh. So they will still assign a 4, or a 3 at worst. Thus, with the 3-point scale above, we have made the “negative” category sound less severe to encourage more people to choose it.

Clearly, the people with strong negative opinions (the few who DO use the 1 or 2 on a 5-point scale) will still use our “Can use some improvement” category. But that category now includes many more respondents who aren’t irate or dissatisfied at all, but who do have constructive criticism or minor concerns to share.

Further, we’ve made it more acceptable to answer with the middle category. Whereas respondents using a 1-5 scale feel like a score of 3 is harsh, our middle item is still framed positively.

Thus, we are encouraging more people to use the middle option, which will reduce the number of respondents who use our “best” category even when they really aren’t that enthusiastic.

This should leave us with only our most enthusiastic respondents in the most positive category, all of our “things are fine” respondents in the middle category, and anyone with a complaint in our bottom category, which is exactly what we want.

Is it perfect? Hah. But I think it gets us a little closer to perfection, and that’s a lot in research.

*   *   *   *   *

I recently observed Carbonite using a 3-point scale, which is a perfect choice for them.

They have a pretty simple business model. They back up your data. Either you think they’re doing it or you don’t. No need for 5-point scales here.

So their survey does a few smart things. First, it’s short and clearly formatted, and very unintimidating.

Next, the categories for the closed-ended questions are Satisfied/Neutral/Dissatisfied.

It’s a great choice. Some customers might have actively recovered data using their services and are happy. Others probably have never needed to retrieve files, and they’re neutral, while everyone else probably had an issue and is dissatisfied. Three types of customers, three categories of response.

If you’re a research geek, it’s gratifying to see conceptualization so perfectly match operationalization.



Connections

The Magnetic Group is dedicated to engaging with the community around us.

There are so many wonderful people, businesses, and organizations in Louisville, and the more we can interconnect, the stronger the fabric of our community will be.

So here’s what we’ve been up to.

In March, those of us not suffering from Strep throat took part in the Brightside cleanup; did you see those nerds in neon green shirts picking up trash on Bardstown Road? We were those nerds!

In April, we were unable to physically join in the Central Park cleanup (a project close to our hearts since Central Park is the home of Kentucky Shakespeare), but we did send a donation to help the cause.

On May 9, we were proud to join Wyatt, Thorntons, ValuMarket and others as corporate sponsors of the first annual Hawk-A-Thon fundraiser at Hawthorne Elementary.

Even more valuable than money, we gave our time, as our entire company spent the day at Hawthorne to organize events and assist with all the fun activities. We were thrilled to hear that Hawthorne raised over $10k for new classroom technology!

[Note: in the image below, it only looks like Aaron does not know how to hula-hoop. In fact, that hula-hoop is on the way up; that’s right, he can start it at his feet and shake it up to his waist.]

Days later, Ziggy volunteered at a big warehouse cleanup for Kentucky Shakespeare, and he managed to break into the Macbeth costumes before security could restrain him.

[Note: blood is fake.]

On May 20, we spent a long, hot afternoon at Tyler Park removing invasive honeysuckle bushes to help preserve the health of the trees. We made another fun connection, as our Olmstead Parks coordinator happens to live just a few houses down from Zig and Jes. Great meeting you, Erin!

Tonight, we launch a very fun project for Actors Theatre of Louisville, in which we’ll be donating our qualitative expertise to talk with key stakeholders about fortifying one of the city’s best arts organizations.

And in June, we’ll be participating in the Jefferson Memorial Forest cleanup.

It’s a thrill to be part of such a tremendous community!

Thank you, Louisville.