What secret shoppers reveal about the cannabis retail experience

A brand can secure space in a dispensary and pay for promotions without knowing whether consumers can find its products online or hear about them from a budtender. A retailer can have a busy store without seeing the obstacles customers and employees encounter during a visit.

Tammy Puyear of TPP Services examines those gaps through secret-shopping visits for cannabis brands and dispensaries. She said the idea grew partly from her own experiences as a shopper.

“As our market matures, the importance of differentiation becomes more important than ever,” Puyear told Greenway.

“I found myself in dispensaries feeling like I was doing the work to determine what options were available and rather than asking discovery questions, I was thinking about how those not in the industry would feel in a shop without any guidance or consultation-type interaction. What if my parents entered a dispensary looking for something?”

What happens after a product reaches the shelf

For a brand, getting a product into a store is only one step. How it appears on the menu and whether a budtender recommends it shape what a consumer can discover.

Puyear said a shopper evaluating a dispensary on a brand’s behalf might begin by asking for a product type, such as infused prerolls, instead of naming the brand.

“Typically, we would ask for a specific product type – say infused prerolls – and ask them several questions to determine what they’d recommend,” she said. “The conversation has plenty of flexibility in it – and can typically lead to recommendations which turn into a larger conversation, depending on the budtenders’ comfort level.”

That conversation can reveal what staff know about the available products and which options they bring forward.

But Puyear said some problems often appear before a customer reaches the counter.

“One of the biggest and most common gaps is that the dispensary menus are frequently incomplete,” she said. “For example, if a retailer has a ‘brands’ page, many brands are missing logos, or the product photos are absent; potential customers are only seeing stock photos.”

Promotions can be overlooked during the visit as well.

   

“Promotions-wise, many shops have evergreen promos that are never mentioned to customers,” Puyear said. “This is a huge miss since it is an opportunity to offer savings without the customer feeling like they are just another face.”

The experience inside

For retailers, a shopper’s visit can expose problems that extend beyond whether a product is displayed or recommended. Puyear said she pays attention to what happens at reception, what budtenders tell customers, how they approach additional purchases, and whether the store follows applicable requirements.

“A secret shopper can bring a plethora of intel to operators – there are simple compliance infractions like a license not being posted in the correct location to budtenders giving incorrect information about products, to how ‘upselling’ is actually being executed,” she said. “Are the budtenders efficient and providing outstanding customer experience or is the person at reception costing you business as the first face they see for your brand?”

One visit identified a problem caused by the placement of popular products. At a busy dispensary with deli-style flower service, prerolls were stored on shelves behind the deli counter. Employees retrieving them crossed paths with budtenders helping flower customers.

“This caused a bottleneck because the prerolls were the 2nd most popular cart item and the budtenders getting prerolls for a customer were tripping over those helping customers at the deli counter,” Puyear said. “A simple move of prerolls to a less busy section of counter space than deli saved time and frustration for budtenders AND customers.”

Puyear said she spent almost three months developing a standard questionnaire so visits could capture different aspects of the experience and reveal recurring issues.

“We use a standard questionnaire, which then feeds a detailed scorecard with each of the dimensions we look for,” she said. “The scorecard features a breakdown of compliance, sales, product knowledge, etc. We can show trends across common issues – such as ‘missing non-regulated disclaimer’ on non-cannabis items.”

For Puyear, the next visit matters as much as identifying the initial problem.

“We like to talk through results with clients and offer some solutions; once they’ve implemented some corrective action, we visit again to determine the impact,” she continued. “A useful action plan means that we do recurring visits over time to identify new opportunities and celebrate overcoming challenges, driving constant and continuous improvement.”