By far, the most screwed up mystery shop I've ever seen..

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

Two jobs ago at my first games store, a CW of mine was the victim of perhaps the most ridiculous mystery shop I've ever heard of.

The secret shopper came in at about 7:45 PM on a Friday. Fridays are usually our busiest days and this one had been pretty busy. To make matters worse, she showed up just after we got through a rush.

So when CW gets the mystery shop report back, He gets a miserable score. The report says he neglected to do the following:

- Greet the customer
- Ask the customer if there was anything he/she needed
- Pitch at least one upsell at the register
- Thank the customer for their business.

He was also mentioned as being "inattentive and not very co-operative"

Now the stupid thing about this is that both my CW and I remember which customer this was and there's probably a very good reason he did so poorly on the secret shop:

The shopper was talking on her CELL PHONE the whole TIME!!

She was on it when she came through the doors, she was on it while she was in the store and she was still talking away on it as she walked out the door.

I know for a fact my CW pretty much did hit all the things he supposedly missed and the secret shopper likely didn't remember them or didn't even hear them in the first place because of the distraction from the phone. Oddly enough, he was marked as correctly having told the customer to take the survey.

Per company policy, a copy of this report goes in employees file and he is given a write up for his apparent poor performance, again because company policy dictates that anyone who gets a poor score on a secret shop gets written up.

My manager knows what's going on and for the next TWO WEEKS attempts to "appeal the case" to anyone who will listen to try to CW's write up and the mystery shop report thrown out. She talks to our district manager, our regional manager and even the VICE PRESIDENT of our entire geographic area (who is two rungs below the CEO) but no one is willing to do anything. All she gets back are form letters and suggestions on how to improve CW's performance.

My manager even tried to get in touch with the company who does the mystery shops for us and they wouldn't give her the time of day either.

To her credit, she apologized to my CW profusely, told him the report and write up was insane and gave him a $50 gift card for all his troubles. She also told him "and if they want to fire me for doing this they can go right ahead."

Fortunately neither my manager nor my CW was let go, but up until the time I left, we still used that same crappy company for our mystery shops.

[Whiskey]

Where is the quality control for secret shoppers? You would think they'd have to list the time of day/what day they were there so you could pull footage and prove the mystery shopper was doing a shitty job.

[fireheart]

Where is the quality control for secret shoppers? You would think they'd have to list the time of day/what day they were there so you could pull footage and prove the mystery shopper was doing a shitty job.

The company that does the secret shops for MY company does that. They list the date and time. However, it doesn't stop the mystery shopper from giving my coworker a 0% on one particular mystery shop....

That will most likely be thrown out as the things she got marked down on were things she'd had indented into her brain anyway.

[Mr Hero]

That's some ****ed up BS right there. I'm of the opinion that if you're going to do a secret shop, that you need to have some way of recording the actual shop.

At my old hotel job, the only secret shoppers we had was by phone and they were testing us on answering within 3 rings, mentioning amenities before quoting price, etc. These were all recorded and accessable to employees.