As a mystery shopper, you likely spend a lot of time and effort picking and choosing the best assignments to complete. After all, some assignments are far easier to complete than others, and some pay much more than others do. While you do want to spend some time choosing the best assignments to work on, you also want to take a closer look at your own mystery shopping providers to ensure that you are working with the best providers available.
Why The Provider Matters. You may think that making money as a mystery shopping boils down to picking out the best assignments and you may consider who you work for as a secondary consideration. This isn’t necessarily the case at all, though. The fact is that a poor provider can have all kinds of negative effects on your job. It can make you waste your valuable time searching tons of bad assignments on a job board to find that needle in a haystack. It can make you take up extra time completing site visits and reports, and often these providers are those who are nit-picky with the answers you provide on a report, which means they often may come back to you with revisions. This takes up even more of your time. Some providers even ask you to make unethical changes to your answers, which puts you in a high stress situation and further takes away time and energy from other assignments.
Taking a Closer Look. Clearly, who you work for as a mystery shopper really is very important to your job. Working with a bad provider can actually affect your paycheck, your happiness as a mystery shopper, and your time, too. Take a closer look today at those providers who you are working for who seem to be a constant thorn in your side. If you’re not sure if your experiences with them are a fluke thing or if they are really a bad provider to work for, hop onto the mystery shopping forum online and take a look at what other mystery shoppers have to say about them. You may find that mystery shoppers have already posted a message or two about them, or you can start your own thread to get the feedback you want.
If You Are Working With a Bad Provider. If you have made the decision that you are indeed working with a bad provider, you do want to make an effort to end your relationship with that provider as soon as you can. This sounds as though it would be a complicated, emotional event, but as a mystery shopper it really is just as simple as not asking for new assignments to work on with that provider. You can finish out the assignments you have already requested, and then find another provider or two to work for you. You can keep your eyes and ears open on the forum to gather some information about a provider who other mystery shoppers are enjoying working for.
The bottom line as a mystery shopper is finding providers who are easy to work for and who pay relatively well, too. This is not a job where stress and a paycheck have to go hand in hand, so if you have a provider who you are not happy with, you do have the power to do something about it starting today!