Mystery Shopping – It ticks so many boxes!
Starting Mystery Shopping has introduced an enjoyable new dynamic to my day-to-day life. Being someone who primarily works alone, from home, it is great to be able to accept face-to-face Mystery Shopper assignments which often take me to new places and require me to engage with different members of the community.
The face-to-face, email and phone assignments are all a great way to be exposed to various companies. I have learnt quite a lot about companies I had never heard of before my Mystery Shopper assignment. I have learnt about new products, about how some companies operate and about what they do.
The window of time given for completion of each assignment means that they are easy to complete around my other activities and commitments as a parent of a busy household. The flexibility of being able to choose which assignments I accept and when to complete them makes mystery shopping a great side hustle or part time job, and of course the extra income is always very much appreciated!
Some of the assignments require the Mystery Shopper to buy specific products, visit specific restaurants or make use of a specific service. Some of these products, locations or services might be new to you, and as the spend cost is reimbursed, these opportunities to try new place and products comes for free!
I believe that treating your customers and clients well is fundamental to success of any business. Being a Mystery Shopper has really helped me to appreciate what good customer service looks like. I enjoy having the opportunity to help companies improve on how they do things and hopefully grow and succeed as a result.
Being a Mystery Shopper has helped me to become more aware of my surroundings and I find I am now more observant when I am out and about shopping or in restaurants. This attention to detail is a great life skill, one which has helped me improve how I do things in my regular day-to-day job too. My communication skills have also improved because I have had to learn how to engage under a pretence, with community members. This has been challenging for me, but it definitely gets easier the more you do it.
Notifications about new assignments come to your phone via text message, or to your email address. Accepting assignments and reporting back with your assessment of the Mystery Shopping experience is really easy because everything is web-based. The forms are clear and you are given excellent guidance about how to complete them, and how to score using predefined criteria. There is a short training course that you are required to complete before you start as a Mystery Shopper, and the information shared during the training is extremely useful in helping to understand the type of behaviours you need to look out for.
Mystery shopping is fun, I am always excited to see what new jobs have been posted and I often wish there were more in my area so that I would have even more opportunity to get out and explore new places and try new things.
