The Mystery Shopping Thread - X

mysterious_girl

kitty2385 wrote: »

I signed up with ESA on Monday and the day after I had a call from them asking me to do 3 travel agent visits for them, one was about 20 miles away so I said it was a bit far away so they offered me £10 extra for fuel if I did all 3. So I said yes and I did the first 2 on Thursday afternoon and they went really well.
I went to do the further away one on Friday and when I walked in, the same assistant who I spoke to in one of the travel agents on Thursday was in there, so I ran out back to the car lol. I rang ESA and they were really understanding and said that even though I couldn't do the mystery shop in that store I am still getting paid for it as it wasn't my fault. So thats £40 I got for 2 visits and going for a drive in the countryside to the other one I couldn't do and back.

Just thought I would let you all know that even when some companies might be giving you trouble, others are grateful for what you do for them and will thank you for it.

I also had a really good experience with an MS company this week. They called me at 11:00 and asked me if I could do a job for them and submit the report by 2:00pm. I said no, sorry that I couldn't. They then upped the fee to 10 times what RE pay for a pharmacy job. Fabulous. Suddenly I was available! Some companies are great, if you put in effort, are reliable and don't let them down things can sometimes work in your favour.

Chris357

finlay wrote: »

Just had all my pizza jobs rescheduled to the following week when I cant do any of them. I have had to cancel them all. They will prob sack me now..

Gap rescheduled all 6 of my burger jobs and I could not do any of them. And, yes, sure as night follows day, they sacked me the following month. But they won't tell you that is the reason. The Gap philosophy is that problems caused by other shoppers are your fault and you will get penalised for them. Nothing is ever Gap's fault. Gap are one of the scumbag companies that you don't want to be working for if you can help it. They are in the gutter with RE.

red_fox

Rosy_Violet wrote: »

As predictedI have been deallocated! I dont know what more I supposed to do - anyone experianced the same thing and have any suggestions?
Thanks

A few other people mentioned problems two days ago 28th.

I had 4 emails with different link codes for 2 jobs. I didn't email them as saw others had but each time I had a link I tried it and it failed until the last ones and they cured it. About ten minutes later I received this email from TNS

We have experienced some technical problems that have affected the ***** Main links dispatch.

If you have received a link for your ***** 1 visit please delete it.

You will receive a new link shortly. As usual, please log into the link and read the briefing notes and the questionnaire to confirm the acceptance of the assignment.

Best regards,
TNS Mystery Shopping

Not much help to you now they have been de-allocated though. All I can suggest is email them again explaining the situation and maybe see if they become available again.

Bring back the Area Managers and people to talk to I say. Things were much more organised before all this self allocation nonsense.[/QUOTE]

Things were so much better with area managers! I can’t tell you how furious I have been with them de allocating my jobs and not responding to me regarding a link problem until after the deadline of an assignment :mad:

BerryDelight apparently they don’t work weekends so I doubt they have given the jobs away to anyone else so try emailing them again although they probably won’t be in until Tuesday because of bank holiday.

josie

I can't seem to get started with ESA. Has anyone who has done jobs for them got any tips of what to put in the pop-up script box please? Or is it just getting that first jobs then you're properly on the books, do you think?

bylromarha

When giving staff descriptions, do you give skin colour?

I always have( talking years here...), seeing as it aides the description, but had an email over the weekend about a recent visit asking me not to use it as it is offensive! How is describing someone as black or white offensive???? If I just said black, it would make sense, but skin colour is a vital part of a description, so I always say black, white, asian etc to ensure it helps find the right member of staff.

What do you all do?

Trying_to_be_good

bylromarha wrote: »

When giving staff descriptions, do you give skin colour?

I always have( talking years here...), seeing as it aides the description, but had an email over the weekend about a recent visit asking me not to use it as it is offensive! How is describing someone as black or white offensive???? If I just said black, it would make sense, but skin colour is a vital part of a description, so I always say black, white, asian etc to ensure it helps find the right member of staff.

What do you all do?

I've been MSing for only a couple of months, but have been told NOT to include details about skin colour/ethnicity, and sometimes not age or build - it must be difficult for the stores to identify their staff members from the descriptions I'm allowed to give.

josie

loopy_lass wrote: »

can i just say, as a shop worker, i get mystery shopped, i would like to tell you how i (and a lot of my colleagues) feel...



Im not saying mystery shopping is at fault here, but beleive me it puts us under really pressure even when we feel good about things. Now no one deserves bad service, but come on guys cut us some slack sometimes, you are doing the job for the money, so are we, but you can help take our jobs in certain circumstances.

so all im asking is that you consider your responses, be honest if you get bad service, not a problem, but just remember sometimes we are struggling to do the best we can under difficult circumstances.


loops

I think this is more to do with the policy in your store regarding mystery shopping, than the mystery shopping itself.

I'm not sure whether you are implying that we don't consider our responses. We can only speak as we find - we don't know the background as to why we may receive bad customer service.

We know it can have serious implications for the employee and no one on here that I've come across takes it lightly.

kitty2385

If I were a 'real' customer and treated badly in a store I know I, for one, would complain to management anyway, and i wouldnt know the back story of the person who served me or gave me bad customer service. I would still report it whether i was mystery shopping or not if I was treated badly. I don't think you should be telling us to 'go easy' on our mystery shopping assignments when we are just doing as we are asked and reporting what we have seen.

As mystery shoppers we are expected to put any previous bad experiences behind us when mystery shopping to give a fair report on the store. If we have to put our bad days and experiences out of our minds when in stores mystery shopping, then its not too much to ask for the people serving us in stores etc do the same.

josie

loopy_lass wrote: »

i appreciate that, and at the start and during my post i did say management were using MS to put pressure on us, and also i didnt expect ms not to report bad service.

what i was trying to get at, was please bear it in mind that management use MS against us sometimes, and please consider if there is a small mistake on our part it may be due to circumstances. Also as you say you are aware of implications, so again, please report bad service, but dont dare i say be overly strict if its just a tiny mistake.

loops

We are aware of that. But it's not a case of us being overly strict about a tiny mistake. We have to be completely objective in what we report. If someone doesn't say please or hello, for instance, it's not us being overly strict by putting it in the report, we're only being factual. We don't say they weren't polite - we just tell it how it is, so it really is out of our hands.

josie

loopy_lass wrote: »

of course, at the risk of repeating myself, of course report bad service, even i do! but i mean things like "not making eye contact", not asking if you "have everything, is there anything else i can get you", or saying "goodbye" or "smiling all the way thro the transaction", i call these little things, but of course if you get ignored, grunted at, your shopping thrown at you of course yes report it.

And my guess is if you feel bad, you make allowances for your views, all im asking is you make allowances for our unseen issues. you can make allowances for your own, we cant.

loops

These are exactly the things we have to report on. Did the member of staff make eye contact? We're not going to say "yes" if they didn't. Did the member of staff say "goodbye"? Also, if we say no to something like this, we will quite often have to put an additional comment in, like what did they do?

Quite often those examples you gave are the specific questions we have to report on, and we have to say yes or no and to do anything other than what we saw would be lying.

So I still go back to saying we only report as we find.