Advanced Feedback is excited to welcome Carnitas' Snack Shack in the San Diego CA area. They will be using our onsite mystery shopping services in order to help with customer service and team evaluations for their restaurants and bar. BASIS Educational Ventures in Scottsdale AZ joined to use our educational onsite secret shopping services for their BASIS Independent Schools in CA, NY and VA.

Contractors State License Schools Renews Telephone Mystery Shopping Service With Advanced Feedback

Client renews their mystery shopping services with the San Diego based mystery shopping company -- Advanced Feedback, Inc.

SAN DIEGO, CA, May 16, 2013 – Advanced Feedback, Inc. welcomes back Contractors State License Schools. Originally signed in 2002, the mystery shopping firm previously conducted phone shops for their California State wide locations until 2011.

The campuses rely on phone shops to monitor each sales agent's customer service skills. Mystery shoppers pose as potential students and call inquiring about classes, rates and availability. Agents are scored based on a number of criteria, such as friendliness, helpfulness, positivity, qualification, building rapport, building value, enrollment / appointment offers, overcoming objections and/or fears.

Linda Tran, Account Administrator of Advanced Feedback states, "In today’s economy, many businesses rely on mystery shoppers to be their eyes and ears on their employees. Phone shops gauge agent performance and the first impressions of their potential customers."

On a daily basis, Advanced Feedback provides immediate results to Contractors State License Schools and many other companies. These results include the agent's individual phone shop report and recorded call; all accessible via online streaming and smart phone apps. This immediate feedback allows for correct training and counsel to take place if needed.  To learn more about telephone mystery shopping visit http://www.advancedfeedback.com/mystery-shopper-phone-training.html

Advanced Feedback - Mystery Shopping Company - Telephone Skills Training and Monitoring

New Mystery Shopping Video Services

Advanced Feedback is pleased to announce the launch of it’s entirely redesigned website at AdvancedFeedback.com. The site has a completely new look and provides users with an overview of all customer experience management tools.

Along with a multitude of varying mystery shopping services, Advanced Feedback is happy to announce our newly designed and reformed video shopping services. Our professional video mystery shopping services provide you with the tools and technology to see exactly what is happening between your employees and your customers. Our services not only provide insight into the experience of a customer, but actual, objective evaluation of your team’s selling skills. Concealed cameras film the entire presentation from greeting to closing.

Businesses hoping to take customer service to the next level can benefit with our services by:

    1. Professional and affordable video shopping services for any industry
    2. View customer flow and analyze performance gaps
    3. Monitor procedures and implemented initiatives
    4. Evaluate new hires and staff veterans
    5. Are your employees ethical and interested in customer needs?
    6. Motivate your sales team and drive them to produce results
    7. Video is highly effective in sales meetings and training seminars
    8. Evaluate your competition
    9. A real, authentic, recorded customer point of view
    10. Visual presentations show you exactly where changes need to be made
    11. Stimulate friendly competition between your top performers
    12. Establish total awareness of your sales or business environment

Howard Puterman, VP and General Manager of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, states “Advanced Feedback has been servicing my needs for the past eight years and has been absolutely terrific. They are always responsive to our ever-changing needs.”

Contact them today to see how we can offer you totally customized sales and customer service inspections.

Welcome to team Advanced Feedback, Caffe Italia!

Advanced Feedback, Inc. is proud to welcome Caffe Italia in Little Italy – San Diego to our list of onsite restaurant mystery shop evaluations! http://www.advancedfeedback.com/restaurant.html

Is Your Hotel Hurting, or Are You Hurting Your Hotel? – Small Tourist Area Sampling Returns Big Results

(Archive - advancedfeedback.com - San Diego, California, May 11th 2009) – Advanced Feedback, Inc. a nationwide customer survey and mystery shopping company, phoned ten hotels, over half the hotels in seaside Coronado CA, a popular tourist island just west of downtown San Diego.  Part of a wider study on business and the economy, the mystery shoppers, posing as potential customers, simply called the front desk and asked “How far are you from Sea World?”

“I wanted to see if agents would make an attempt at a sale … with someone calling their hotel from out-of-town.” explained Geoff Gladu, Account Manager for Advanced Feedback.  Perhaps not shocking to this group of seasoned mystery shoppers, but alarming to any business manager, the team did not find one hotel agent who attempted to continue the conversation beyond answering their initial question.  “I was hoping to hear something along the lines of  ‘would you like for me to check rates and availability?’ or “Is there anything else I could help you with?’ anything, really.  Also, no one even thanked us for calling”, he added.  Considering these businesses spend a good share of their marketing budget on getting travelers to call their hotel, Advanced Feedback’s survey uncovered pervasive missed sales and branding opportunities.
Perhaps the hotel agents ignored the sales opportunity because the scenario implied the caller wanted to stay closer to Sea World, 6 miles from Coronado? To test this possibility, the team conducted a second survey to the same properties with the question “what is there to do for fun in the area?”  This time, all hotel agents did fine to sell the area but only two agents built value for their hotel and only two others thanked the customer for calling. Again, not one hotel representative attempted to continue the conversation or make a sale.

Deciding to make it as simple as possible for the front desk agent to recognize a sales opportunity, without saying “I want to make a reservation”, the mystery shoppers called the same hotels a third time asking, “How much are your rooms?”

Only one out of the ten properties that were called received a passing grade; the agent qualified the caller, built value for both rates and property and even offered to make a reservation.  All others failed.  One property attempted to qualify the caller, another spoke well of their property, but all of them were quick to provide the rate and let the potential customer off the phone – never once asking if the caller wanted to stay there!

“With beach weather soon approaching, there’s no better time for these seaside hotels to learn how to recognize and pursue the sales opportunities given – this usually starts with phone skills via a mystery phone shopping program”, said Geoff.

In a challenging economy like the current one, Advanced Feedback’s research is a wake-up call to companies not to overlook the training and monitoring of front-line employees.

Advanced Feedback extends mystery shopping to canine pals too!

(Archive- advancedfeedback.com Feb 05, 2009) Advanced Feedback, Inc. has extended their mystery shopping services to their local neighborhood Humane Society, who was originally concerned that the mystery shopping company was too big for the single location.

As stated by Nicole Campos, Customer Relations Manager, “I appreciate all of your help while we develop a program that best suits us and within what your company can do. I realize that it is a little different than what you normally do considering the nature of our business and that we only have one location.” After working closely with her dedicated Account Manager, the two companies were able to tailor a program to fit Nicole’s exact needs.

The San Diego based company now conducts both weekly phone shops and a monthly onsite mystery shop offering valuable feedback in a timely manner. Phone shops are placed to help make sure that each incoming call is forwarded to the correct department is important. Phone shops help get pet related questions answered correctly while capturing the quality and level of the customer service by targeting each of the Humane Societies eight departments. These calls range in a number of different scenarios and are valuable to Nicole due to the frequency of the calls, which are delivered to her by email including the recording and a detailed survey within 24 hours.

These phone shops help keep the employees on their toes and provide the required level of customer service to all guests, both two legged and four. The onsite mystery shop conducted each month not only targets a specific department but also the main facilities. With a full summary of the details, along with an easy to understand scorecard, the information allows Nicole to visualize from the customer’s point of view. When asked about the program after six months of use, Nicole stated, “We are very happy with the shop results and are finally able to really use a lot of the data we have collected for training and new hires.”

At http://www.advancedfeedback.com you can learn how this mystery shopping firm is able to customize and tailor their services to fit your needs.

Telephone Mystery Shoppers Find Hard Times Drive Hard Tactics

Good phone skills should be obtained by building a level of rapport with a prospective client before asking for their business.

(Archive - advancedfeedback.com - San Diego, CA, Feb 19, 2009) – With the country now officially recognized as being in a recession since December of last year, businesses are scrambling to adapt. Many are simply trying to hang on, abandoning, at least for now, visions of increased market share. Thus it perhaps should come as no surprise employees who deal with the public over the phone have become more aggressive, says Kurt Adams, Senior Accounts Director of Advanced Feedback, a leading provider of telephone monitoring services. "It used to be we were asked to measure items that tended to make the customer feel warm and fuzzy, such as using their name. Now it seems the sole focus is how many times we get asked for our business", commented Mr. Adams.

While employee interest in getting or retaining a customer's business is undeniably an aspect of good service, how and when this is manifested can be of equal importance. Specifically, Adams' cites asking the customer for the business in the first 10 seconds of the call. "I know it's a bit of an exaggeration, but isn't that like asking someone for a date before knowing their name?" he asked. Good phone skills suggest building at least some level of rapport with a prospective client before getting to the proverbial bottom line. Showing interest in a customer is more than asking repeatedly for an appointment or reservation; other elements include using the customer's name or asking how they happened to be in the market for the company's services. Moderation, as Ben Franklin reminds us, is a good thing.