Honestly, I don't think GfK is on it's way out and even though I have my issues with this company, I would not like to see this happen.
With that being said, there are several issues that need to be addressed (I'm only mentioning a few here, don't want to write a thesis):
- Disorganization within this company. For being the "4th Largest" mystery shopping company in the world, they sure are disorganized. From what I understand, they didn't release the August guidelines for the retail store audits until this morning. The fire drill mentality was common when I was scheduling there and that disorganization starts from the top.
- An overall lack of respect for their contractors. The high turnover for schedulers is because they don't treat them with a general respect. Shoppers are often ignored and schedulers refuse to answer their phone for a shopper 9 times out of 10, unless they are desperate to fill a shop. (I will post more about this topic at a later time, as I can point out several examples)
- Apathy. Schedulers don't really care about the shoppers and are insensitive to the shoppers needs. This practice is encouraged by the entire company. Shops are excluded without any explanation to a scheduler, yet the scheduler is supposed to field the inquiries from the upset shoppers of why the shop was excluded.
- Shoppers are expendable and treated as being a "dime a dozen". They don't believe in working with a new shopper to help them gain a general understanding of what is being asked of them. Sure, they do hold training calls, but the training calls are basically an admin reading the guidelines over the phone.
- The quizzes are a joke. There are always questions that are not worded properly and misleading to shoppers.
- No creative direction for recruiting new shoppers. I brought this subject and ideas up several times, but was blown off. They wonder why they only have 3 qualified auditors in a state where they have to fill 4 retail store audits monthly; this is why.
- As a general rule, they do not promote from within. The only field coordinator with them that was promoted from within was Christy Ensley; all of the other current field coordinators were cherry picked from other companies.
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Arguing with fools is like playing chess with a pigeon...
...No matter how good you are, the pigeon will s@^t on the board and strut around like it won anyway.
Not scheduling for ANY company.