Alaska Mystery Shoppers Helping Business Improve Customer Experience.

• Author: ORR, VANESSA
• Position: Brief Article

It thas probably happened to you. You've gone to a store and found something that you wanted to buy. Maybe it didn't have a price tag, or there wasn't a salesperson around to help. Or there was a salesperson, but he or she didn't know any more about the product than you. It was frustrating, and you wondered, "does the owner know that this is the way his store is being run?"

With the help of Alaska Mystery Shoppers, business owners can learn exactly what's happening at their locations. Alaska Mystery Shoppers, or AMS, is a company that provides highly targeted evaluations to organizations that want to measure, track or review certain aspects of their companies. The evaluations are prepared by AMS contractors, who visit client locations as regular customers and evaluate the location from the customer perspective.

Owned by Scott and Julie Norman, AMS got its start in 1999 after the couple had a bad shopping experience. "We walked in and asked an employee where we could find kitchen chairs," explained Scott Norman. "He pointed and said 'down there.' So we went 'down there' and found the chairs, but there wasn't any price. We found another set, and there wasn't a price on them, either. When I went back to find the employee, he was sitting down reading the paper-I think doing the crossword. We walked out on a $400 purchase. It was atrocious--that business was being victimized by its own employee."

Since then, Alaska Mystery Shoppers has helped businesses throughout Alaska evaluate salesmanship, facility appearance, timeliness, employee appearance, security and cash procedures, product quality, employee honesty and more. Unlike a customer feedback card, AMS evaluations are designed to target specific client concerns.

"We ask questions that you'd never see on a comment card," said Norman, who added that while most customers will not complain, 7 out of 10 simply will not come back if they're not satisfied. "We'll tell you whether the place was great, or whether it seemed that your employee couldn't care less, or if we saw two of your employees making out .... There are things we see that you sometimes can't believe."

Past assignments have included doing "free pour" checks in bars (seeing if a bartender over-pours or gives away free drinks), checking to see if employees card 19-year-olds buying cigarettes, doing food stamp compliance checks, checking on the quality of a company's telephone operators, and, at times, monitoring employee honesty.

"We...