Mystery shopper Confero is America’s top small business
When you’re in the business of making other businesses better, you’re built to last, and you’re built for success. That’s a big reason why mystery shopper Confero, Inc. was not only the top honoree in the Enduring Businesses category but also won CO—100 Top Business 2024. The honor came on Oct. 8 in Washington, D.C., at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s annual awards show for America’s best small businesses.
“I think they liked that we were a small business that worked with big companies,” Confero president and CEO Elaine Buxton told BOSS. “We bridge the gap. We are a B2B company, but we also use consumers to do the mystery shopping and the interviews. We cast a wide net.”
Any place a consumer can interact with a company, Confero can be there, testing that company’s quality of customer experience and providing vital feedback on improving operations. It’s a big reason why corporate giants such as Jiffy Lube, Coca-Cola North America, AMC Theatres, and Jersey Mike’s Subs place trust in Confero.
Wizards Behind the Curtain
Once thing that’s been part of Confero’s promise for 38 years is that it produces only quality data. There were times throughout those years when it was easy to break into the mystery shopping business and just send your friends out to a couple of places, assuming what they said reflected universal truths. Confero established itself by professionalizing that data, programming its software in the 1990s to produce metrics and summarize reporting for clients, and pinpointing areas where they could improve their processes.
One of Buxton’s favorite aspects of the job is working with retailers and restaurants that are at an inflection point in their growth. Confero helps them identify key processes that they need to improve for successful expansion.
“When we started working with Jiffy Lube in 1992, they had just been bought by Shell and they had around 300 locations, now they have 3000 locations,” Buxton said. “So what’s fun is working with a company as they’re growing, and then being part of that.”
As those companies grow, their processes and hierarchies become more complex. As that happens, Confero segments data based on the role of the person they’re presenting it to. Regional managers get the data relevant to their job, as do marketing managers and operations managers.
On the customer-facing side, Confero can connect its app to the client’s app and solicit granular data.
“We can ask certain questions at lunch, certain questions at dinner, certain questions only in North Carolina, certain questions only in California, only around limited-time offers,” Buxton said. “It’s all anonymized and we can be the wizards behind the curtain and control all of this.”
Enduring Quality
Buxton had just returned from three years in Europe and agreed to help with her mother’s fledgling consultancy and training business while she looked for her “real job.” Nearly four decades later, Buxton is still at that temporary job, and Confero has endured a lot in that time.
A major turning point was realizing that the needs assessments they provided were more valuable to clients than the training, and that what they were really doing – and excelling at – was mystery shopping. Jiffy Lube came on as the first national client in 1992. The company’s Cary, N.C., office was hit by a hurricane in 1996. Buxton was on the original board of directors for the Mystery Shopping Providers Association. There have been recessions and a banking crisis.
“Survival is a big word for me now after the pandemic because, as you can imagine, most of our clients closed up,” Buxton said.
So when she and her marketing team decided to apply for the CO—100, they entered in the Enduring Business category. Application questions asked about strategic planning, financial planning, and navigating through difficult times to not just survive, but thrive.
A month or two later, they learned Confero had made the semifinals, then the top 100, complete with an invitation to the CO—100 awards in Washington. At the event, Confero won its category, and Buxton went on stage with the other category winners.
“Then at the end, they announced that Confero was the top winner of all,” she said. “It is still a surreal, kind of out-of-body experience for me. It’s just such a privilege.”
What’s Next
Buxton said much of Confero’s endurance comes from a senior team that has been with her for at least six years, some as many as 27 years.
“What we bring to client programs is experience and a brain trust that some companies can’t provide. Imagine you are an organization and you engage a company to mystery shop your 1,000 locations, say. In the discovery and bidding process, a lot of times you know the winner of the bid might be the biggest company that can give you the cheapest price. They’re also going to give you the person straight out of college who doesn’t know the business yet. We don’t do that.
“Our clients know we’ve got their back. We’re going to have a program that they’re proud of and information that they can grow from.”
Next for Confero is building out a turnkey system for growth companies in the restaurant and retail industries as they franchise. As organizations expand into franchising, they encounter a great deal of complexity in putting together a customer experience and mystery shopping program to rate procedures and processes. Sometimes a franchisor provides the service, sometimes they encourage or require franchisees to conduct their own, and sometimes they don’t but it’s something franchisees want.
With the program, Confero will “bridge the gap and make it easier for corporate teams to not have to navigate all those relationships. We can take that over from them,” Buxton said.
They’d do well to let America’s top small business take that off their plates.
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