As a mystery shopper, you can weeks and even many months at times without ever needing to contact your provider. Yet there are times that arise when you need to reach out to them and get a response back about something specific. This may be an urgent question that you have about an assignment with a pending due date. It may be about your pay (or lack thereof) on an assignment, or something else altogether. Of course, in an ideal world, a provider would respond quickly to you but there are times when you just cannot seem to get that response back that you need. So what can you do?
Try Another Contact Method. Mystery shopping is one of those jobs where it’s pretty easy to just shoot off an email here and there. The entire job, except for the site visits of course, is done electronically. You request assignments online, turn in your reports online, and often now even get paid over the internet, too. Of course, email isn’t the only method of communication, and so you do want to pick up the phone and try to call your scheduler directly if you are not getting a timely email response.
Call the Company Directly. There are times when people are out of the office and either forgot to set up an auto-responder on their email and revise their voice mail message or when they just didn’t have time to do it. There may have been a sick child they had to rush home to tend to, a car accident, a family emergency or any other such situation. Sometimes a call in to the company’s main number can provide you with some details about whether that person is working today. Keep in mind that you can always ask for assistance from another person.
Prevention Is a Good Idea. Of course when you are already waiting for someone to get back to you is a bit too late to apply prevention measures, you can work to prevent this type of event from occurring in the future. If a provider regularly pays you late or you have had issues with their payment procedures in the past, this may be an indication that you should be working with a different company. If the issue is on your end with questions on an assignment requirement, you could have read the requirements sooner and allowed yourself more time to get your questions answered. Spend some time considering what you could have done differently that could have prevented the need for an urgent response.
In most cases, providers will indeed respond to you as their mystery shopper pretty quickly. During holidays, weekends, and off hours, you should allow more time for a response, but even during normal business hours, the time for a response can vary quite a bit. Keep these strategies in mind so you can get your questions answers promptly, if not by the scheduler in question than by someone else in the office.