There are many kinds of bad mystery shoppers. In a lot of cases, that means they don’t stay mystery shoppers very long.
- Image by PinkMoose via Flickr
There are those who think it is easy money. It is not. Sometimes an assignment may not pay very much money because you’re only on the assignment for a few minutes or maybe you’re merely getting reimbursed. It requires work, reliability, and you have to be detail oriented. And we’ve found some people who, well, just aren’t. Here are seven of our “favorites:”
- Cancelers: The shopper who accepts a job and then cancels. Sometimes there are people who accept an assignment but then, after reading the instructions just decide it’s too much work. Or the shopper who always has a lot of excuses as to why they can’t complete their assignments. Again, dependability is one of the most important things that is required to be a good mystery shopper.
- Screamers: A shopper doesn’t do the assignment properly and doesn’t follow the directions and then gets upset because they aren’t paid. It never occurs to them that if they don’t follow directions or do the assignment properly, we don’t get paid either. We can’t send work to the client that was not done properly.
- Liars: The ones who falsify their work or lie about their time in a store, like faking a photograph, or pretending to show up to a store for a follow-up visit. People often think we won’t know or can’t figure it out, but this kind of fraud is amazingly easy to identify and prove, and we check all of our submissions before we send them off to the client.
- strong>Thieves :Then there are the shoppers who we send video or audio equipment to that never gets back to us. We then end up having to get the authorities involved and having someone show up on their doorstep to get our equipment back.
- “Hey, I’m a Mystery Shopper!” There are shoppers that call ahead or otherwise identify themselves, which defeats the purpose of being a mystery shopper. The whole idea is to objectively gather information on an operation when it isn’t evident that somebody is evaluating things.
- The Fake Mystery Shoppers: The other side of the not-so-mysterious shopper are people out there who may not really be mystery shoppers, but they walk into stores and tell people they are in an attempt to get discounts or special treatment. Mystery shoppers don’t get special treatment, discounts, and should never, ever identify themselves.
- Cell phone talkers: Another trait of a bad mystery shopper is one that spends the whole assignment on their cell phone. Someone who is supposed to be doing an assignment where attention to detail is critical just isn’t doing the job if they’re chattering away on their mobile phone.
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