Can Mystery Shoppers Improve Your Website?

There's a whole industry out there based on paying shoppers to rate stores, vendors and websites. The "mystery shopper" business is booming for good reason. For brick and mortar businesses, the shopper reports on their experiences, from store layout and finding things to customer service, product availability and prices.

In the Internet world, it's big business too. Here's a quote from a mystery shopper website that connects businesses with online shoppers:

Become a Web Mystery Shopper & earn money from home!

More people are shopping online every year and this shows no sign of slowing down. Smart companies know that they need to understand what customers think and feel when visiting their website. That is where you come in. By becoming a Web Mystery Shopper, you will interact with websites as if you were a customer. Your thoughts, feeling and suggestions will then be recorded and taken into account when it comes to improving those sites.

This site page is recruiting online mystery shoppers who want to make money from home. You don't have to hire a site like this, but let's consider how you can use the concept to improve your real estate website and generate many more leads and commissions. We all think that we know what a real estate website visitor wants and needs to find on the site, but do we REALLY know? And, it's not just about what they want to find, but can they find it easily and quickly?

We can always survey our site visitors or past clients who found us on the Web or did their research for buying and selling on our site. However, they're working from memory, and surveys are always risky because we're asking the questions, and maybe they're not the right questions. Let's consider the "mystery shopper" approach. We can offer to pay an hourly rate to two shoppers/researchers to spend up to around three or four hours each on our site.

A really great way to choose these two people is to ask people who have just recently completed buying and selling real estate. These can be our own past clients or anyone we find who fits the bill. We want one person who has recently been a buyer and another who has recently closed the sale of their home. We want them to have fresh memories of the questions they had and any problems they experienced.

Give them written instructions about what you'd like them to report about in using your site. The recent buyer will be told to search for information about buying as if they're a novice. The same goes for the seller shopper. Have them spend their time on the site searching for answers to questions they asked when doing their deals, and have them write down their experiences, remarks, complaints, frustrations and good experiences in getting around your site and locating information.

Tell them to be very thorough and take all relevant links and read the material they find. You want to know if questions were fully answered or they were left wanting more. You want to know if they found dead links, or if they got lost or off-track because they had trouble with your navigation. Be sure they understand that you're not looking for compliments as much as you're looking for suggestions for improvement. It's quite OK for them to tell you negative things.

You will spend a few dollars, but you'll get rewarded many times over through their feedback and the improvements you'll be able to make to your site.

To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.