By Steven Cooley, Customer Impact Scheduler
The vast majority of mystery shop companies employ the idea of shopper rotation on their shops. Shopper rotation is the minimum amount of time before a shopper is allowed to shop the same location or client again. For example, if a particular shop has a 90 day rotation, this means once you complete a shop for that location, you will not be eligible to shop that same location again for 90 days. There are several reasons for this.
1) We don’t want you to be identified
The company does not want the employees at the shop location to identify you as a shopper. When a shopper is identified, we have to make them ineligible for that client’s shops permanently. This is not ideal for the shopper or the mystery shop company!
2) We want to provide a variety of viewpoints to the client
Part of the valuable service that a mystery shop company provides to our clients is the variety of data about their customers’ experiences. If we continually send the same shopper over and over, they are getting similar information from the same perspective multiple times. This can be valuable if it’s what the client desires, but more likely than not, the client is more interested in many different perspectives.
3) We want to give lots of shoppers a chance to complete shops
Many of our shops are very popular with our shoppers. We try to make sure that many different shoppers have the opportunity to perform a given shop. As a shopper, it can be very frustrating to be constantly willing to perform an assignment, but never given the chance to do so.
In addition to the shopper being ineligible to complete the shop again within the rotation period, we also consider their dining guests ineligible for the same amount of time. For example, if you shop a location in January and take your spouse as a guest, you and your spouse are both ineligible to complete the shop again until the rotation is up. This is because, to the restaurant, you are the same group, regardless of who submits the report to us. This increases the chance of you being spotted by the location, and so it’s strictly prohibited.
As always, please do not hesitate to contact us and ask if you are not sure about a rotation period. We are here to help and want to give you every opportunity to complete the assignments you are interested in! Please contact us with any questions about Mystery Shopping.
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