Possible £50 for car or home insurance mystery shopping

steve237

Update from me. I emailed again today and was told me £25 cheque for the home insurance survey has been sent 1st class today.

Sachin_Joshi

IanCHughes wrote: »

hi there,

I have followed up with you via personal message, so i can get this sorted ASAP.

Ian

Hi Ian,

As requested, hv replied back to your personal message.

Thank you in advance for your help.

IanCHughes

Hi there,

I run the company, so I thought I might respond.

This is a great idea, but not what we do. We don't take any commission from anyone. Mostly because that would make our research biased.

We could be accused of focussing only on those companies that pay us a commission. If we did take a fee we would automatically return it to our mystery shoppers in their payments.

The problem is that we would be accused of unfairly influencing the outcome of the research with these payments.

To be clear, I make my money from doing research and if i can find a way to do this WITHOUT prejudicing the outcome then I will use more mystery customers and pay them more.

Thanks for the thought, keep those ideas coming.

Ian

dacouch wrote: »

What a great [STRIKE]Scam[/STRIKE], [STRIKE]way to generate commissions from Insurers[/STRIKE], [STRIKE]way to gather peoples renewal dates and personal details to sell on to Insurers next year way[/STRIKE] to do a "Survey"

You simply offer £25 for people whose Insurance Policies are currently due for renewal. Get them to ring specified Insurers or Comparison sites. What are the chances of some of these people taking out cover and the survey company receiving a nice juicy commission from the Insurer...

dacouch

So the fact it is only available to people whose policies are due for renewal has nothing to do with it...

raskazz

IanCHughes wrote: »

Hi there,

I run the company, so I thought I might respond.

This is a great idea, but not what we do. We don't take any commission from anyone. Mostly because that would make our research biased.

We could be accused of focussing only on those companies that pay us a commission. If we did take a fee we would automatically return it to our mystery shoppers in their payments.

The problem is that we would be accused of unfairly influencing the outcome of the research with these payments.

To be clear, I make my money from doing research and if i can find a way to do this WITHOUT prejudicing the outcome then I will use more mystery customers and pay them more.

Thanks for the thought, keep those ideas coming.

Ian

Ian,

So can you confirm that in the interests of eliminating bias, you do not in any way contact the insurers concerned prior to undertaking the market research exercise?

dacouch

Raskazz it could be that he is not paid a commission but Insurers are interested in paying top dollar for conducting "market" research on people who are due for renewal as they have a chance of getting the business.

Ian do you sell the data you receive on eg names, addresses and renewal dates to other companies?

By the way please read the MSE rules as you need permission to post if you are representing a company on MSE

IanCHughes

Actually, it has everything to do with it. we want to know the real opinions of real people who really are in the process of renewing their insurance.

Our previous research has shown that the way we think about insurance changes depending on whether we are actually in the process of buying or not.

Quentin

IanCHughes wrote: »

I run the company, so I thought I might respond....

You cannot use these forums to "answer questions" about your business! (Unless it is a well known "household name".)

Companies should not be answering questions on this forum unless they're either a large, household name, or have been mentioned in one of MoneySavingExpert's guides. If you feel there's an abuse issue relating to your company that you'd like to reply to, please email [EMAIL="abuse@moneysavingexpert.com"]abuse@moneysavingexpert.com[/EMAIL] so that the MSE Team can establish that you are genuinely from the company you say you are

IanCHughes

Apologies for responding to dacouch and Raskazz's email separately, from my previous post. Not good form and I will avoid it in the future.

The companies that we are testing are not just the ones that we monitor or who pay us. We act totally independently, the last piece of work we did was not actually sold to anyone, it was entirely for ourselves, to work out what is going on in the market. So no insurers were contacted.

And no, we would never pass any details of anyone on to any of our customers.

And re the MSE rules, I will check with MSE about that. My personal view is that I would prefer that we do respond to any potential issue or criticisms, if we make mistakes I want to fix them and do so very quickly.

I take a personal interesting in serving our Mystery Customer Community in the best possible way.

Personally i would wish that more CEO's would take an interest in what was written here.

Hopefully my actions haven't caused offence.

dacouch

Your welcome to respond to posts in this thread or any other thread and represent your company. However if you want to represent your company you MUST abide by the MSE rules which basically mean you have to be approved by MSE, carry a signature noting you have approval to represent your company from MSE and not promote your business.