Undercover shopping a mystery to many
By Naomi Snyder
The Tennessean
It's 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday and about 40 people are seated
in rows of tables at the Embassy Suites Hotel Nashville near the
airport, having paid $115 per head to become gold-certified mystery
shoppers, the top brass of undercover customers.
They are learning the ins and outs of the latest technology and
techniques in clandestine shopping. (Make sure the flash is off
on your camera; make entries in a Palm Pilot or go to a restroom
stall to take notes.)
''We need to get the word out that this is a serious profession,''
said Cathy Stucker, a Texan who leads the workshops on behalf
of the Mystery Shopping Providers Association.
What is mystery shopping?
Companies ranging from retailers to banks to hospitals are using
independent contractors to make visits and then report on their
personal experiences, sometimes in detailed reports with upward
of 200 questions about everything from the cleanliness of a store's
or restaurant's floors to whether the server smiled or said, ''Thank
you.''
Some shoppers-for-hire are armed with hidden cameras, digital
recorders and other devices to keep an accurate record of what
happens. Companies use the information to improve service, reward
employees Ñ and occasionally, to fire them.
Mystery shoppers call on the phone and pretend to be, say, a
bride shopping for a wedding gown or a homebuyer looking for a
loan. They show up at apartment complexes under the guise of needing
a place to live. They walk into stores to secretly jot down prices
on behalf of a competing company.
Occasionally, they are hired to do a ''shop'' with the express
purpose of seeing if an employee is stealing.
A typical job like that might involve buying something at a convenience
store or a bar, then walking away while a private investigator
standing nearby observes whether the employee puts all the cash
in the register.
Making it better
Seafood restaurant chain Captain D's uses customers as mystery
shoppers to evaluate the performance of its restaurant.
It pays as much as $7.50 in meal reimbursement for the job, which
involves filling out a report online of some 100 questions.
Matt Gloster, the vice president of administration for Nashville-based
Captain D's, said the company takes its mystery shopping forms
seriously, but hourly employees rarely get fired because of them.
Managers, if their shops show consistent problems, can get fired,
he added.
The more than 500 restaurants get shopped on average six times
in a month, and the reports are tacked to a bulletin board for
all employees to see. Each employee has to sign each report, Gloster
said.
''If someone does something wrong, we need to know that, and
everyone needs to work on making it better,'' Gloster said.
Each location gets an average score based on their reports ranging
from excellent to very bad. Any bad or very bad average scores
could keep a store from getting remodeled until managers improve
it, for example.
Sales check-up
Beverly Gleason owns Knoxville-based Mystery Shoppers, a company
that acts as a go-between for companies looking for mystery-shopper
contractors.
She said sometimes, mystery shoppers find illegal activity in
the course of a routine job.
One shopper of hers noticed a cashier wasn't ringing up her purchase
at a clothing store. She told the company, which investigated
and found the employee had stolen $30,000. (Mystery shoppers sign
contracts agreeing never to divulge a company's name.)
But employees don't have to do something illegal to get fired.
Teens working at a Carmike theater in Roanoke, Va., were fired
this summer for failing to up-sell, or encourage customers to
buy more, larger items at the concession stand, according to news
reports. The company had used mystery shoppers to check on employees'
performance.
John Swinburn, the executive director of the Mystery Shopping
Providers Association, said he doesn't think an employee ought
to be fired because of a mystery shopping report.
''It may be that someone had one bad day, and that's the only
time that happened.''
However, it is up to the company, not the mystery shopper, what
to do with the information.
Shopper's remorse
Christine McCrary, a 28-year-old Memphis-area mystery shopper
who attended the Nashville gold-certification workshop, said her
report once got a server suspended at a restaurant/bar for two
weeks, which made her feel guilty.
But most of the time, her assignments didn't result in anybody
getting punished.
''Most shoppers recognize that all we're doing is reporting,''
Stucker said. ''Our being there didn't cause the employee to do
a bad job.''
McCrary has been paid $100 to play at a casino (she spent two
hours working and a few more hours playing). She has spent a free
night in a hotel in exchange for a detailed report. She said at
her busiest, working about 25 hours per week on mystery shops,
she made $1,000 in a month.
''You can't be relaxed. You record when you were greeted, how
you were greeted, what they said to you when you sat down,'' she
said. ''You're observing 5,000 things.''
Julie Petzko, a 65-year-old mystery shopper from Nashville, said
she sometimes feels guilty about apartment shopping because she's
not really in the market for a place to live, and it takes so
much time for an apartment manager or staff member to show a unit.
''They try so hard to sell you this apartment, and you just walk
out,'' she said.
Let's pretend
Mystery shoppers such as Petzko come up with pretend scenarios.
She visits grocery stores regularly and has to come up with questions
that present employees with a problem. For instance, if she knows
they don't have a particular kind of fresh fish, she asks for
it to see if they will offer her something else.
Like other mystery shoppers, she tries to get employees' names
and makes a note if a nametag is missing or hard to see.
The semi-retired Petzko estimates earning $14 or $15 per hour.
Petzko hopes to get into video recording, because those mystery-shopping
jobs pay better. Pay can range from $40 to $100 for a ''video
shop,'' compared to other routine assignments that pay no more
than $10 or $20. (Some restaurants only reimburse mystery shoppers
for meals.)
In a videotaped mystery- shopping visit, the customer typically
wears a hidden camera under a shirt, with a button for the lens,
or conceals it inside a purse.
Thirteen states require both parties to consent to taping (Tennessee
does not), according to Michael Bare, owner of Video Eyes, a sister
company of Bare Associates International in Fairfax, Va.
His clients pay $200 to $500 per assignment. Bare gets signed
release forms from employees ahead of time, putting them on notice
that they may be videotaped at work at a later date.
Most of his clients are homebuilders and apartment complex owners
who want to videotape salespeople, but car dealerships and retail
customers are paying for the taping as well, he said.
Employees see the tapes and evaluate themselves, coming up with
ways to improve. The whole process is meant as positive reinforcement,
Bare said.
''The information is basically irrefutable,'' he said.
Jordana Beebe of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse said she had questions
about companies using outside contractors with hidden cameras.
Employers have run into problems when they try to record in dressing
rooms or bathrooms, and cameras can be used to capture credit-card
numbers.
''Why they are allowing their mystery shoppers to do that is
simply a mystery,'' she said.
There are many ways to monitor employees, and security cameras
are common in many workplaces.
''When in the workplace, employees have little expectation of
privacy,'' Beebe said. ''They are scrutinized almost the entire
time they are on the clock.''
Growth industry
Now, a wider array of companies are interested in doing mystery
shops. Gleason said she has gotten more calls lately from health-care
companies, such as hospitals, interested in improving customer
service. She even lined up a job with a knee-surgery patient who
agreed to evaluate her surgery experience.
HCA uses mystery shoppers who pose as job candidates and then
give 10- to 20-page reports on how well the human resources department
handled them, according to Larry Burkhart, vice president of human
resources for the mid-America division of HCA.
Some companies are moving away from paying independent contractors
to go undercover, and they're simply getting customers to rate
the shopping experience.
O'Charley's, the Nashville-based restaurant company, is switching
to random surveys of customers, who get incentives to answer telephone
questions about their experience.
O'Charley's is printing random receipts with offers of $3 off,
or a free appetizer, if a customer calls a toll-free number and
answers a five- or 10-minute survey.
The company's chief support officer, Susan Osterberg, said the
new program will cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars
to implement, but the restaurants will be able to get input from
more customers.
''We've had a lot of success with the mystery-shopper program,
but we just think this is the next step,'' Osterberg said.
