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Secret Shopper Employment - Is it For me? 
By: Jennie Clapham
Secret Shopping is now well established as a method for organizations to get quick and accurate feedback as to how their company is performing in the vital art of delivering customer satisfaction. Although new technology has completely changed the way that many of the activities are carried out, companies still need answers to the same basic questions they were asking all those years ago.
Most of the worlds largest organisations now use secret shopper or mystery shopper programs as a key part of their business strategy and this creates a great opportunity for ordenary people like you and me to earn a good part-time income with rates normally in the range of $10 to $40 per hour. There are even plenty of people who do this on a full-time basis and are regularly making in excess of $50,000 per annum.
Secret shoppers are just ordinary people doing what might seem to be an extraordinary job. You have to act just like you were a regular customer, whether it is in a department store, a hotel, a restaurant, or even on a weekend away...yes, you will even get the chance to take a vacation at someone else's expense. What you then have to do is to provide an accurate and unbiased report to the secret shopping company detailing the good and the bad things about the service you have received.
One of the important things you will need to be able to demonstrate is the ability to provide a great deal of detail about your shopping experience. You will need to remember things such as the color of the employee's hair, what sort of clothes they were wearing and much more. You will need to be able to communicate all that happened during that shop including all of the details that you have observed. This is done through writing up a report. Some reports are in a question and answer format that you will need to go through. Others are more paragraph form in which you will need to provide details. In all forms, you will need to have skills that will allow for detailed, concise, grammatically correct and spelling error free writing.
It is very straightforward to become a secret shopper. First of all, you have to find yourself a secret shopping agency. There are many on the internet, take a look at as many as you can and start off by selecting one that you feel comfortable with. You can sign up with others later. Once you have supplied your details, you will be notified of assignments in your area. Pay for shopping jobs can range from as little as $8 to $10 for fairly simple assignments, buying a hot-dog for example up to $50 or even $100 for really complex jobs.
It is important that you have the ability to be able to write up a detailed and objective account of you shopping experience. The more time you spend on this activity, particularly in the early days, the more interesting and better paid assignments will follow. Agencies put great store in having a reliable shopper and if you start to build a name for yourself as reliable, thorough and flexible the greater will be your shopping opportunites in the long term.
I am often asked if any special tools are required to become a secret shopper?, and the simple answer is No. The only thing that you will really need is access to the internet and I guess that as you are reading this report online then you already have this. There are a few items however, that you may already have that can be a great help. A digital camera for example can be very useful, but don't get caught taking photos or your cover will be blown!. Also, a small tape recorder could be very useful, particularly if you use it to record your thoughts as soon as you leave the store. The more tools you have at your disposal, the easier and more effective your shopping assignment will be.
Companies all around the world now recognise the tremendous benefits in terms of improved customer service by utilising shopper experience measuring methodologies such as secret shopping. The fact is that that there are now very few organisations who do not employ agencies to provide this type of service. Airlines, Hotels, Retail Chains all provide us with the opportunity for money making assignments.
Secret shopping is not a 'Get Rich Quick' scheme. It is however a rewarding and enjoyable way to make money, particularly if you are like many people in this world who actually enjoy the shopping experience. It is of course even better if you are able to do it at someone elses expense. Many people have proved that it is possible to make a full time income from secret shopping and even if you only want to work on a part time basis, you can still earn enough to pay for that extra special holiday or pay the car loan off and you even get to have fun while doing it!.
Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles
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