“What is Sassie mystery shopping?” We receive a lot of enquiries from mystery shoppers and clients asking what Sassie and Presto are and what our connection is to them.
Quite simply, Sassie and Presto are mystery shopping software programs. While some Mystery Shopping Providers (MSP’s) use their own in-house software, most choose to licence it from a speciality company.
It can be tempting to have software custom-built and save on licencing fees, but when you see the features that you get with worldwide software, it’s an easy decision.
We could hire a company to build us a custom email program to save on annual Google fees, but the team at Gmail have pretty much nailed it. As a small business, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel just so we have our own wheel, we’re happy to leave it to the experts.
In this instance, the experts behind Sassie and Presto are the team at Live Shopper Sassie LLC, and before that, the team at SurfMerchants, who designed Sassie back in 1998. We have enjoyed a mutually beneficial business-to-business partnership with the team at Surfmerchants and Live Shopper Sassie for over a decade. Switching to Sassie was one of the best business decisions we’ve ever made as it allowed us to grow exponentially.
What is Sassie?
SASSIE stands for Scheduler And Shopper Survey Internet Engine, or Sassie for short. Mystery shops need to be scheduled, aka assigned to a shopper. The Sassie software allows three key teams to work on mystery shopping projects. Our admin team use it, including our schedulers and proofreaders. Our mystery shoppers use it to view surveys and submit the results. Then our clients use it to view their reports and trending data.
As far as we know, Sassie is the most popular mystery shopping software in the world. It’s used by over 150 providers, over 18,000 companies and over 3 million mystery shoppers.
Their user-friendly mystery shopping platform is second-to-none. The Sassie reporting platform has standard features, but also allows individual mystery shopping providers to customise their platforms. Throughout our twelve years of using Sassie, we have taken customisations to another level in order to enhance the experience for shoppers, clients, and our admin team.
We’ve designed our mystery shopping platform to best suit Australian standards and practices. These customisations included special survey designs, question formats, automatic timezone changes, and expanding it to work with Australian bank accounts and regulations so that we could remain the fastest-paying mystery shopping provider in Australia.
What is Presto?
The Sassie software has been around for decades making it incredibly big and powerful. To keep up with advances in technology, crowd-sourcing, online job boards and the need to have data in an instant, the Presto Mobile Ap was born. Mystery shopping providers who licence the Sassie software can choose to share general information about survey releases to Presto. Each survey location shows on a map accessible by every shopper who has a shopper profile on any of the mystery shopping providers who use Sassie software.
To put it more simply, our Sassie Job Board is only visible and accessible to Above Benchmark Mystery Shoppers. The Presto Ap is like a national Job Board, accessible by any Mystery Shopper who has an account with any provider.
Presto has some other great uses, unknown to shoppers, but loved by our clients. It’s perfect for Customer Satisfaction surveys and Employee Feedback surveys. The survey results can be viewed side-by-side to the mystery shopping results, making it a one-stop reporting shop for clients who like to keep things simple.
Can any mystery shopper with the Presto app do an Above Benchmark survey?
No, every mystery shopper who conducts a survey for us needs to complete an application form and pass a telephone interview before being invited to join our team. We pride ourselves on knowing who our shoppers are, seeing their report-writing skills and listening to how they carry on a conversation before we allow them to conduct mystery shops for our clients.
We occasionally publish some of our mystery shops to the Presto Mobile App. These shoppers must already have an account with us to see more details and apply.
Is Above Benchmark affiliated with other MSPs who use Sassie?
No, there is no direct connection between Above Benchmark and other mystery shopping companies that use the software. We’re all individual mystery shopping providers using the same core software to collect and present the data. However, one of the many great features of this software is the ability for mystery shopping providers to collaborate.
The collaboration module allows us to partner with other Sassie users around the world. One of our Australian clients started opening showrooms in the USA. We collaborated with a Sassie user in the USA to have the mystery shops conducted and pushed to our system.
Who do Mystery Shoppers work for?
Mystery Shoppers work for the individual provider. Most mystery shoppers work for multiple providers at the same time. None of these mystery shoppers work for Sassie or Presto. Mystery Shoppers receive emails and alerts from Sassie and or Presto. They are all triggered by the mystery shopping provider that the shopper is registered with.
Mystery Shoppers can work for multiple MSPs that use Sassie software. However, they need to have a unique username and password to access the individual sites and job boards.
In summary, for over a decade Above Benchmark has used the Sassie software for our mystery shopping. We have highly customised it to the point where it is significantly different from the standard Sassie design. Other mystery shopping providers do also use the Sassie software and the Presto Mobile App. Above Benchmark is entirely separate from those other providers.
