Hi! I'm a hardworking, loyal employee of a business I've spent the past five years trying to do everything in my power to help. I loved it, loved the people and believed in the product. Today, my boss said I'd been "mystery shopped" over the phone, and my scores weren't good. I read the piece of paper this mystery shopper submitted, and I recalled the conversation I had with her. I knew she was a fake call at the time of the conversation--she asked the strangest, most circuitous questions with no logic to their sequence, questions that almost no one asks, and certainly not out of context--yet I still did my best to be as helpful as possible to her, as if she were a real person. Then, this woman had the audacity to write paragraphs about my failure to meet specific phone call criteria. This woman who is not real. This woman who represents exactly 0% of our call base and our clientele. This woman who thinks she can evaluate my performance as an employee based on her stupid fake phone call filled with stupid vague questions? Who thinks she can assign scores to the hours, days, months, years of labor I have put in evangelizing our business to the most clueless, the most entitled, the most willfully stupid people in the most efficient, warm, caring and cheerful manner? Who does this woman think she is? Who do any of you think you are? What sort of terrible people must you be to derive your daily bread from the ruthless gutting of well-meaning, earnest people like me? You fall prey to this capitalist system that pits brother against brother, thinking you sit at the right hand of the father when you merely trot obsequiously behind the cowhand. Shame on you.

The thing is, the questions the shopper is required to ask are not questions she "made up." The questions are provided to us by YOUR boss to find out if the training that you received is followed through on. Often, we shoppers know that the questions we are required to ask will "out" us as the shopper and we are just as uncomfortable asking those questions as you are to get them. But, ask them we will, because we're also hardworking, honest, loyal people and we are REQUIRED to ask them for our livelihoods. Our paychecks depend on us asking the questions that YOUR boss wants us to ask. It's possible you weren't trained to know the correct way to respond to those questions, which is a failure on the part of your trainer/supervisor. It's possible you were trained and you just didn't feel like answering the questions or you didn't remember the answers you had previously been taught. That failure is completely on you. If you "knew" the caller was the mystery shopper, why did you not take that moment to "shine" and put on the performance of your life, hitting all the points correctly and getting an awesome review? We, too, are honest and hardworking people. We can only report what happens on the phone call. And honestly, the hardest reports are the ones we have to write about those clueless, entitled, willfully stupid employees that THINK they're efficient, warm, caring, and cheerful, but really have no clue as to how to provide decent customer service over the phone.

@goodhonestperson wrote:

Hi! I'm a hardworking, loyal employee of a business I've spent the past five years trying to do everything in my power to help.

Shame on you.

Shame on you, goodhonestperson. You are not being completely honest with yourself and you are blaming someone else for your failure. I'm sorry your performance did not meet your employer's standards. That's always disappointing, not only for the underachieving employee, but for the supervisor and the company. It is also disappointing for the mystery shopper, because it is much, much harder to write a mystery shop report detailing negative performance than to write a positive report where the subject did a super job and sparkled.

Do yourself a favor. Take responsibility for your failure and use this as an opportunity to improve your performance. The reason most mystery shoppers shop, in addition to making a few extra $$s (we work just like you, imagine!) is to showcase employees doing a good job so they can be rewarded or to identify performance that requires additional training. Accept your failure, get additional training, and perhaps you will sparkle on your next mystery shop.

@goodhonestperson
Some things to consider:
* Your company seems to think mystery shopping is important - as do about 90% of companies. Otherwise, they would not be paying through the nose to have it done and there would not be 300 mystery shopping companies.
* The quality of the mystery shop feedback depends on quite a few factors, one of which is the scenario your company gives the shopper. If we don't follow it perfectly, we don't get paid. You would never have seen the report unless it was followed exactly as specified by your employer.
* It is true that, just like with any industry, there are folks who do a good job mystery shopping and those who don't. Could you have gotten a mediocre shopper? Yes.
* Mystery shops are performed for a variety of reasons and you might not know the company's objective for this shop. Sometimes we are used to improve training programs. Sometimes we are hired to verify the effectiveness of a new training program/method. Sometimes companies want to know about compliance with legal requirements (before they are caught and fined).
* Employees should never be disciplined based exclusively on our reports. We are not in HR. We are not employees of your company. We are not your boss. If you were disciplined, either your boss is doing something incorrectly or there is a history that you have not shared.

Have you asked your boss what you should have said differently? If you thought that the questions were strange, did you ask your boss about them? Was there something about the questions that might have suggested they were checking a legal standard?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/19/2017 07:35PM by MFJohnston.

Assuming the OP isn't just a troll, they are obviously a legend in their own mind. How stellar can someone be with this opinion of their customers,

"the most clueless, the most entitled, the most willfully stupid people"

Mind blowing and yes, shame on you to blame all of Mystery shopping on one bad report....reminds me of a child that is said no to...blaming all for your short coming, grow up and get over it....
Writing about your short comings on a public forum, shame on you, improve yourself, library has self-help books free. We are all honest hard working people, not awful as you state, what happens when you actually have a real problem? Sounds like a troll...just sayin.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/19/2017 04:56PM by Irene_L.A..

...............years of labor I have put in evangelizing our business to the most clueless, the most entitled, the most willfully stupid people in the most efficient, warm, caring and cheerful manner?..............

That. That is the reason you failed. Even if you don't say these words, your voice tells it.

Anywho, I think this is a scammer because they speak like someone from the UK and there is no specificity in the claim AND they jump from a pompous ass to a religious ass.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/19/2017 05:35PM by spicy1.

Your responses prove you are supercilious, self-important people with absolutely zero experience in customer service. Well, MFJohnston seems kind of ok, albeit I philosophically disagree with their choice of profession.

You are all missing the point entirely. Your scripts are designed by people at the corporate levels of companies and do not reflect the majority of users' practical experience. Then we are judged by this theoretical standard with no basis in reality. Yet you persist in your dutiful enforcement of whatever rules are handed down to you, cheerfully making your calls with absolutely no regard for the people with whom you speak or the greater pictures into which you insert yourselves. I'm not blaming you for the disconnect between the corporate and executory levels of companies. But that you seat yourselves in these positions of judgement is baffling.

You are foot soldiers in the billionaires' slow war to automate human interaction. You are taking your bayonets to the seams of our society and you don't even care.

And LisaSTL, no, not all of my customers are clueless, entitled, and willfully stupid. A lot of them are great. But a great deal of them are not. I work in an area that can tend to attract certain types of people and bring out the worst in them. Shall I tell you about the 30 minutes I spent on the phone saying nothing as an angry customer yelled at me without coming up for air once as my boss sat near, mouthing "I'm sorry" and "are you ok"? What about the endless numbers of people who call me just to have me Google things about other businesses? Or people who find our policies don't apply to them and ask me the same questions over and over, irrespective of my answers? It's about a 60/40 split between these types of calls and normal people. Yet with all of these people, yes, I am kind and professional, and I'm friends with them by the end of the phone call. I take pride in this specifically, and it's verified by others outside of my own mind. But you would never know that, would you? You'd never think that. Thanks for proving pretty much my entire post, LisaSTL.

Also I'm not from the U.K.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/19/2017 05:44PM by goodhonestperson.

Has anyone reported this one to the moderators yet? I have never read a more phony, dishonest post. Are you a frequent flyer on other forums or just this one?

Because my post implicates you in negativity, you're calling me phony and dishonest?

If you are a call center employee, your scripts are designed to do what they are designed to do. You are not supposed to be "friends" by the end of the call, that is not your goal. I agree you should have personal feelings regarding the outcome of your calls, but certainly not toward the customers or the interaction in between the initial call and the end of the call. Most of the people, if not all, that do mystery shopping work are from customer service jobs. We play by our scripts and it sounds like you need to do that as well and get over the emotional aspect that you have put into your own judgments of how your calls should go. When I worked at the call center for Greyhound, they allowed us to hang up the phone if someone was belligerent. When I read the other forum call center conversations, they say they are allowed to hang up as well. Where do you work where the company forces you to stay on the line for a half an hour while someone screams at you? BSer

And if you don't like your employers questions, maybe consider another career. As Mama used to say "If you don't enjoy touching hairy balls, don't get all romantic about working at a kennel or as a vet because you will be washing hairy balls."

@goodhonestperson wrote:

Hi! I'm a hardworking, loyal employee of a business....

Why won't you identify what company you work for?

Sorry you failed on your mystery shop. Just try to improve next time and learn from your mistakes. If you don't like the mystery shopping business, don't take it out on the "foot soldiers", but rather lobby to congress about the detriments that mystery shopping has on vulnerable employees, like yourself. Lobby to your state legislator because he has more influence than a mere mystery shopper.

My boss places a premium on customer service. Hanging up on someone would just be rude. Perhaps it's a little much, but it's true, and at the end of that scenario, we had a happy customer instead of an angry, resentful one. Greyhound is very large, very corporate, and probably doesn't need to worry about alienating customers. Their hold in the market isn't at all giving way to newer companies, is it?

I wondered if someone would say that about my "being friends" comment. 1) it's figurative; no one's going to lunch with anyone; and 2) I stand by that because it reaffirms the human connection that corporate America so desperately seeks to eliminate, at which you are all working away with your erasers.

People sometimes even thank me at the end of our conversations; they say things like, "I'm so glad you're a real person!" They say I'm refreshing. From what do they need a refreshment, I wonder? Oh--the artificial system of interaction in which you are all complicit.

Lobby your congress and legislators. That's some funny stuff right there.

It's the people who have the power. It's the enforcers who let it happen. People blame congress all the time, but it's they who need to wake up and effect change within their own communities.

Greyhound, and any company, is always and constantly on it's toes about customer service and it's competition. In and around the city I live in there are Intuit, Sitel, Lowes among many others. They all have the same "belligerent customer" rules. I have not heard of a company that allows this. There is actually a law against it, it's called harassment and companies are not allowed to allow their employees to be harassed so you can lay off of the "my company forces me to be yelled at for a half an hour" bs. Even if you work at a seedy Motel 6 or at the Ritz, that is not allowed. You may have decided to stay on the call but that would be your decision and against company policy, that is, if you are in the U.S.

I was secret shopped when I worked there. After the secret shop portion they told me I had just been shopped. They reminded me of the points I missed and I thanked them for it. I was a little embarrassed for sure and it took me about 10 minutes to stop smiling like the Cheshire Cat who just got caught eating the Ratatouille Rat. But I certainly didn't think that they mystery shopper was a "culprit" in any sort of conspiracy to make me look bad or was on a binge to make sure the world is full of scripted, non-humanish responses from call center employees. How did you do in primary school? Did it upset you when you were told to carry the one and you really just wanted to leave the one out of the equation all together?

Today is clean the house day and wash clothes and iron.

You are right in some ways. Have you considered forming a group, maybe similar to Antifa, and start causing rebellions and starting mini revolutions on the streets? Maybe start boycotting companies that have a mystery program? I agree, it has to start within a community to illicit change.





Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/19/2017 07:41PM by DavePi.

@goodhonestperson
We all acknowledge that there is often a disconnect between the corporate world and the folks on the front lines. We know that our questions may come across as strange and might "out" us as shoppers. If you read this board, you'll find many examples. However, as outsiders, we are not going to convince anybody that procedures are poor. Rather, we are asked, "Are the employees doing this? Our job is to answer. If the questions are really that out-of-place, the answers that the mystery shoppers return to upper management will consistently show that the folks on the front lines are not responded as expected. That will lead to either a change in corporate policy or in training and communication procedures.

So, think of us more as one medium of communication. Corporate wants to know if their employees are doing something. They ask us to find out. We tell the truth. That's really about it. We do not discipline. We do not pass judgment. We simply report what we see and hear.

One client for whom I shop specifically uses the shops for training purposes. They bring the reports (which are often audio or video recorded) to the employee and use them to help the employee to be better at his/her job. In the case of car sales, where the salesperson earns commission, we are effectively helping the employee to make more money. I've also done compliance checks for the banking industry and have seen them for alcohol and/or tobacco. I've done bar and valet parking cash integrity audits. In these cases, we are potentially catching illegal activity before the FBI or ATF do - which can result in serious damage to a company. If we see poor cash-handling procedures, the company will take a closer look to see if there might be theft. (We are generally the first report that says, "Something might be amiss at this location." The company will then commit more resources to investigate on their end.

I know that folks who are shopped may not like us. However, we do help the industry as a whole, which benefits honest employees as the businesses can improve profitability and offer more hours and higher pay.

Finally, don't assume anything about mystery shoppers. We come from all sorts of backgrounds and relatively few of us do this full time. There are retired folks who do this for a little spending money. There are some who do this so that they can enjoy fancy meals out. Some do it as a hobby as it gets them out of the house. There are stay-at-home parents who just want to make some money on the side so that they can afford to stay at home with kids. Yes, there are those who do this full time. Many, however, are like me: I work full time and do this to augment my income. I appreciate the flexibility it gives my schedule. I also know most of us have worked customer service at some point or another. I've managed a candy store, worked fast food and cashiered at a large grocery store. My career, however, is High School Teacher. I am teaching Algebra 2, Pre-Calculus and AP Calculus this year.

A suggestion, before you get too critical: Take a look at what we do from our side. Sign up with a company or two and try a shop or two. Find out what it is we actually do.

I don't blame him/her. I shuffled my annoyed butt on over to the Kroger employee forum and told them a thing or too myself! anything else? anything else? They can just mentioned the stupid chicken that's on sale.

.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2018 07:36PM by Megs7521.

Hi goodhonestperson,welcome to the forum!

@OP:

That is a bummer. I do not know what happened or did not happen. But I send you hope for the future. Perhaps experiences like yours will be instrumental in producing needed changes in evaluations.

From experience, I know that life happens, even on the job. Sometimes, if an employee does or does not do something, it looks bad in a report or as feedback. But what the employee actually did or did not do may have been the best thing for all concerned-- but no one with authority knew how to understand that. In those situations, the employee/-s were subjected to negative consequences that might be lifted or waived, if only someone in authority could understand and consider it.

I can understand why you think we are awful. We have agreed to perform certain tasks without knowing what benefits or unwanted consequences may accrue to other people. We do not know if our efforts have harmed anyone else directly or indirectly. We might be awful, and we might deserve that feedback.

Please forgive us.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/20/2017 12:51AM by Shop-et-al.

Just for debate, if you bought a new car, and had trouble with it, would you blame the Salesman, no, so how do you blame an Industry because one person didn't understand your report. I'd have to say "narrow thinking"..

Shot-et-al means please forgive her. No need to forgive me for doing my job which is take write down the answers that YOU give me. Next time, give the answer you're told to unless you own the company and are brainstorming customer service tactics on an unsuspecting customer. If you're given the leeway to provide your own personalized service then your issue wouldn't be an issue. And Shot-et-al, I know exactly what the benefits and consequences are when I'm performing these jobs. Our efforts cannot harm anyone if we are telling what happened! We are absolutely not "awful" and how in the world would we deserve that feedback? Sometimes people have a hard time with the truth, especially when we've done something wrong. Buck up sailors.

I wish I could like your post several more times. Count me among those who don't need anyone apologizing on my behalf and has no intention of apologizing for doing my job because someone else doesn't do theirs.

GHP, do you know how many great and positive reports I have written about people who did their jobs correctly? Lots. I know of several great reports that resulted in promotions, bonuses, and/or raises. I, like many shoppers, are saddened and disappointed when I have to write a bad report. Its a lot more work to have to report a lot of negative observations, for one thing. And it sucks to know an employee wasn't giving it their all and following their company's guidelines, especially when the person is likeable. But, we have to remaim objective and report the facts. That doesn't make me a horrible person.

DavePi, is that you?