Does anyone have experience with Sentry Marketing?

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Great to be here.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/02/2010 02:54AM by rebx2112.

I have done a few of their mall shops, and stopped, as their reports are too long for the pay. Do love the Italian ice creme though.

I have done jobs for them for 2 years now. Originally they were great to work for, but low pay! Now they are impossible. I have dropped them entirely.

post edited

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/02/2010 10:10AM by jklberry.

jklberry
I respected your post. I wonder why you removed it. Please tell.

In recent months, we've actually raised the fee on both of the assignments mentioned in this thread. The gelato shop fee was raised from $9 to $12 flat fee. The other project, a QSR restaurant shop, has gone through a few changes before we settled on a $16 flat fee. After the required purchase, each of these projects now pays a $5 - $7 fee.

We landed on the $16 flat fee in response to a shopper survey we conducted. Over 200 shoppers were kind enough to participate and their opinion ended up shaping the pay for this project. This month we are testing a new program that will reward shoppers who earn a top score with an extra $1 - $3 fee.

In response to other shopper feedback, we are also reviewing and updating shopper instructions for all projects as well as putting the finishing touches on a we are putting together a Shopper Assignment Completion Guide. This guide has been put together to help put our shoppers in the best position to succeed by sharing assignment standards and guidelines information with them.

As always, if can answer any questions in this forum or offline, please do not hesitate to contact me. Your feedback is always welcome.

Thanks for your time.

Dave Agius
The Sentry Marketing Group
www.sentrymarketing.com
dave@sentrymarketing.com

Sentry is fair, but very stringent. Do not make them mad. I think the fees are fair for the work, although some the reports are a bit lengthy--yet you get paid for the work. The gourmet burgers shops are nice and some good BBQ eateries, too. There are also some nicer hotel dining shops I never had a chance to do. I miss working for them, but that's not my choice.

Bottom line: follow every detail, be thorough, do not be late on entering reports (deductions will incur), and have open communication with your scheduler.

The decision to suspend a shoppers account is not taken lightly. Our schedulers and editors, Beth, Janice, Bonnie, Terri and Jennifer, are all hard working, dedicated and professional folks who take their job seriously and are proud of the work that they do. Our team is committed to communicating with our shoppers in a respectful and professional way. Occasionally, we are confronted with an email that is written in an angry, unprofessional or abusive manner. On these occasions, the team has decided that the appropriate course of action is to no longer offer assignments to that shopper.

When we establish a deadline for the submission of a shop, we try to balance the project requirements and the need to give the shopper an appropriate amount of time to submit a top quality shop. Some of our projects involve shopping the client weekly or up to 4 times per month. These projects are very time sensitive and involve a great deal of coordination in order to us to provide outstanding service to our client.

In general, our lunch shops are due the day of the shop while dinner shops are usually due the next day. Typically our other projects allow at least 24 hours. The key for us in this area is communication. If completion of the visit has been confirmed and submission of the shop is forthcoming, we almost always grant a request for extension.

It can be a bit more difficult to act when a deadline has passed and we have not heard from the shopper. In many of these cases, the timing and shop rotation don't leave us with much of a choice other than to withdraw the shop and reassign it. Ultimately, the fee deduction for late submission is used to reward our outstanding shoppers as much as it is to encourage communication and on time submission.

The vast majority of the shoppers we interact with are pleasant, professional and great to work with. Without great shoppers, there is no way our company can continue to grow and prosper. I hope this information is helpful.

As always, if can answer any questions in this forum or offline, please do not hesitate to contact me. Your feedback is always welcome.

Thanks for your time.

Dave Agius
The Sentry Marketing Group
www.sentrymarketing.com
dave@sentrymarketing.com

Dave,

Thanks for clearing it up. I will go to your board and try and schedule knowing things are better. Your comments are appreciated, and thanks for listening to us.

I kind of like the idea of bonus pay built into the pay structure for a well written report. That's an extremely interesting idea. I know it will probably have me 'self editing' my report an extra time or two. In fact - I picked up a sentry shop this week in response to that idea. Innovative & interesting.

-M

About Face offered the fee + $1-3 bonus for shops requiring little to no editing. It didn't make life simpler. Submit 6 shops, 3 go to editor A and 3 go to editor B. Editor A awards the full $3 on each shop with annotation of "Good Job". Editor B awards $1-$2 on the shops with "Some edits". Go figure. Bottom line dealing with them was if the fee alone is not worth doing the job, don't do it because the bonus award was arbitrary. My understanding is that About Face has abandoned the practice.

MM and Flash - Thank you very much for the feedback.

MM - I appreciate you giving our company a tryout. If you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate to contact me directly for assistance.

We are taking steps to increase the consistency of scoring mystery shopping reports in our company. The first step was for us to assemble a guide that details our content requirements in a clear and easy to understand format. That document is being reviewed by a number of our key shoppers and we expect to publish it next week.

Next, we are going to publish a scoring guide that will be used by our editors and available to our shoppers. The scoring guide will help shoppers understand how each shop is looked at, the difference between major and minor omissions/errors and why a shop was assigned a particular score.

The rationale behind the bonus program is that we were looking for a way to reward those shoppers who prepared properly, followed the guidelines and submitted top quality work. At this time, all of our projects require some narrative. In my view, it's not right to pay a shopper who submits an "A" report the same fee as a shopper who submits a report that required heavy editing before it could be released.

In the future, if we launch a project with little to no narrative, it is likely that that project would not include variable bonus.

Thanks again for all your input!

Dave Agius
The Sentry Marketing Group
www.sentrymarketing.com

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/05/2010 01:53PM by Sentry Marketing.

Rats - I only got a 5 out of 6. The shop itself was somewhat difficult as there were only two employees visible when I arrived, and about 10 minutes into my shop, one of them went home for the night. There was very little to observe as far as employee interaction.

It was a pretty easy report, however, and the feedback from SMG came quickly.

I still love the idea, Dave, of giving automatic premiums to well-written reports. That's genius!

Good luck!

I like the idea of a bonus pay scale. As I have said in the past, these reports are detailed to a degree and getting a 6 can be a challenge. But who isn't up for a challenge?

I have been monitoring the payment for two shops that I recently completed for Sentry. I have been treated "warmly" by one of the schedulers who promptly answers my questions via email. However, their payment within 60 days policy has not been met. I completed my first shop with them on 1/9/10 and have yet to be paid. I looked at the Shop Status, and it said that a check was to be sent yesterday 3/17/10. That is over 12 days beyond the 60 days.

When asked about shopper payment timelines, I was told in an email - "All payments are within 60 days – some get paid sooner but never later."

They are also promoting a "bonus" if you score a 5 or 6 on a certain restaurant. I have been shopping for over 5 years and usually never score less than the top score. For both of these shops, I scored a "4" which makes me ineligible for their bonus promotion. My feedback has been that my report is good but....

Thanks for the 'reality check'.

juricekl,

Thank you for your feedback. It's very helpful for us to see things from the point of view of our shoppers.

For clarification, the Check Date that appears in the shoppers status page is actually the estimated date that you should receive your check. This date is assigned by the processor when we submit the payment information. Based on your comments, we are going to revise that field to clearly communicate this information. In addition, we are going to more clearly communicate our payment policy which should read:

Payments are made by check. Checks are mailed no later than 60 days from the date your assignment is accepted.

Nonetheless, your payment was a few days late and I apologize for the delay. We are working on installing new procedures in the area of shopper payment and it has caused a bit of a delay. We're currently up to date with payments being mailed at about 6 weeks.

When you received the score for your shops, did you receive feedback that explained why the shop was assigned a score of "4"? If you did not, please contact me directly at dave@sentrymarketing.com so I can address your concern with our editors. We've recently published a Guide To Successful Mystery Shopping reports that may be of interest to you. This document clearly communicates our content expectations and includes the criteria that our editors use to score shops. We are trying to be as transparent and consistent as possible when it comes to scoring. As you can see from a previous post, a shopper did receive a score of 5.

The reality is that we would love to pay the bonus on every shop. It makes our life easier when shops do not have to be returned for clarification or otherwise delayed.

I don't really have a good response for your comment about receiving top scores from other companies. We have specific quality guidelines that our clients expect and we are working diligently to communicate those standards and provide our shoppers every tool necessary for them to be successful with our company.

The bonus program was launched to reward those shoppers who produced top quality work. When we launched this with the March round of shops, our team made a decision to retroactively include any shop completed after January 1, 2010 in the program. I looked at those numbers today and we have paid out bonuses to over 40% of shops submitted in the test project.

Our intent was for the program to be a perk to our shoppers. If it turns out that the program is a source of dissatisfaction, we'll discontinue it and look for another way to connect with our shoppers. So far, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

Again, thanks for the comments.

Dave

Shop scores vary widely between MSCs.

While some companies will give you a 10 for simply submitting a report on time and not use ALL CAPS, others will give you a 9 for a report that you proofread twice, spend an hour on, and followed the example as closely as possible, with no explanation of why the deduction occurred.

When I was grading shops, I would get a lot of complaints from shoppers who were used to getting a perfect score from other (meaning 'easy grading') companies, but received a deduction from me for the same level of work.

My advice; Know that not all reports and not all grading scales are equal. The best chance to get a perfect score on your shop is to understand the materials and examples presented for the shop you are working on. I've seen the guide that Sentry is now supplying shoppers and the guidelines for a perfect score are reasonable, and less stringent than other MSCs I work for.

The difference I see between the shop reports I fill out is that multiple choice are always more accurate. By that I mean this:

If the report asks: 1. did I see rust on the curb, 2. did I see chipped paint on the curb, or 3. did I see chipped concrete on the curb, then I can answer each with a yes or no.

But if the report asks: Write a paragraph on the condition of the curbs. Minimum length is 300 characters.

So which report with be more accurate?

Asking me to write a paragraph is OK as long as you tell me specifically what you want. A description of the food that arrived at my table? What the manager said to me when I asked my leading question?

If you want specific information, ask it in a specific way, giving me a list to choose from, or a yes/no.

rarely done Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The difference I see between the shop reports I
> fill out is that multiple choice are always more
> accurate. By that I mean this:
>
> If the report asks: 1. did I see rust on the curb,
> 2. did I see chipped paint on the curb, or 3. did
> I see chipped concrete on the curb, then I can
> answer each with a yes or no.
>
> But if the report asks: Write a paragraph on the
> condition of the curbs. Minimum length is 300
> characters.
>
> So which report with be more accurate?
>
> Asking me to write a paragraph is OK as long as
> you tell me specifically what you want. A
> description of the food that arrived at my table?
> What the manager said to me when I asked my
> leading question?
>
> If you want specific information, ask it in a
> specific way, giving me a list to choose from, or
> a yes/no.


You will find that more shops than not require a short to lengthy narrative. Only a couple of companies will give detailed questions such as these in MC format, and those will be low-paying shops that almost always have to do with compliance to corporate guidelines. If that is what you want to do as a shopper, stick with MFI, CoRI and Maritz. They are most likely to have those types of reports.

Edited to add, this post has nothing to do with Sentry. It has to do with the poster's question about multiple choice questions.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/19/2010 09:29PM by dee shops.

rarely done Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If the report asks: 1. did I see rust on the curb,
> 2. did I see chipped paint on the curb, or 3. did
> I see chipped concrete on the curb, then I can
> answer each with a yes or no.
>
> But if the report asks: Write a paragraph on the
> condition of the curbs. Minimum length is 300
> characters.
>
> So which report with be more accurate?

If there was a banana peel on the curb and a staff member was rushing over to clean it up during your meal, and also warning guests to be careful, the narrative will be more accurate. The N/A selection on the multiple choice would have told the restaurant owner nothing about the experience otherwise.

(Edited to bring my answer to exactly 300 characters)

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/19/2010 06:53PM by SteveSoCal.

SteveSoCal -

The point I was trying to make is that if you want to get reports accepted and KNOW that the company wants, it will be more accurate from me and I will get paid.

dee shops - Different subject than I was replying to. If I can't make a profit, I don't do a shop either.

...and my point was simply that if your burger arrives 30 seconds late because the staff member was cleaning up the banana, but your multiple choice narrative asked if your burger was presented in under 1 minute, the story of service at the restaurant cannot be accurately told without a narrative component.

In your scenario, when the restaurant receives a deduction for the meal being delivered late, reviews the security video and complains to the MSC about the deduction being unfair, the whole process actually takes more time and probably generates a re-shop.

rarely done Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> SteveSoCal -
>
> The point I was trying to make is that if you want
> to get reports accepted and KNOW that the company
> wants, it will be more accurate from me and I will
> get paid.
>
> dee shops - Different subject than I was replying
> to. If I can't make a profit, I don't do a shop
> either.



This post has nothing to do with Sentry Marketing. I have no idea why it is taking place in a thread about them.

rarely done, I said nothing about $, nor did your earlier post.

My point was that if you need a MS company to spoon feed that level of information in order for you to feel you the answers you give will be "accurate", then you should be looking at specific MSC's that do this. I totally agree with SteveSoCal on this issue. The MC question will give a datapoint. The narrative will expand on the datapoint and put it in context.

My posts were exactly about Sentry Marketing.

The reason that their shops are difficult to get a perfect score on is because they rely heavily on narrative sections, rather than just coming to the point and asking what they want to know on the shop report (I am limiting my comments to a particular restaurant that I have done shops for which I have done Sentry shops). If you want to call that "spoon feeding", I am OK with that.

rarely done Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> My posts were exactly about Sentry Marketing.
>
> The reason that their shops are difficult to get a
> perfect score on is because they rely heavily on
> narrative sections, rather than just coming to the
> point and asking what they want to know on the
> shop report (I am limiting my comments to a
> particular restaurant that I have done shops for
> which I have done Sentry shops). If you want to
> call that "spoon feeding", I am OK with that.


rarely done, I don't know anything about the shops you are doing for Sentry, your scores with them, or your scores with other companies, nor what kind of shops you generally do. My comments were much more generalized. Almost every shop I do relies moderately to heavily on narrative. In general, these pay better because they require more time as well as better writing skills to fill out than MC ones do. I likes my easy MC shop somewhere I am already going as much as the next shopper, but I don't expect to make much on them, and don't even consider my "grade" on them.

I have done exactly two shops for Sentry over a two and half year period. Both were work intensive and narrative heavy. Both only paid me for the food, and were casual eateries. Was I paid? Yes. Were they worth the work? That depends on what is important to me at any given moment. At the times I did them, I wanted the lunch for two that I got, for whatever personal reasons I wanted them, so I agreed to the terms presented to me.

One was smooth sailing. On the other one, I encountered severe Prophet issues that made me lose my work several times in the same evening. Needless to say, I was not at all happy. I sent email to Sentry about the issues and went to bed. I got a response within hours, though it was the wee hours of their night.

I was paid within the time frame specified for both shops. On the latter one, I was given a bonus for my troubles.

I want to say that Dave and I do not see eye to eye on some MS issues, and have gone more than 10 rounds here in this forum in the past.

I have recently edited a document for their firm. I was given a pre-release copy sent to several shoppers for feedback. Of my own volition, I revised the document I was given. I said that if they liked the work, pay me for it. It was a one time document. We negotiated a payment and I was paid promptly. I only say this as the latter has become an issue with another member here, who asked me via PM not to continue speaking in this thread earlier today, as the person felt that without my full disclosure of my, and I quote, "financial interests in this firm" I was misleading people here.

My sole "financial interests" in this firm are these: I have shopped for them twice and been paid on time. I did a speculative edit of a document I was sent and was paid for my efforts.

And Dave and I still will not ever agree on certain aspects of this business.

That is all I have to say about Sentry, as that is the full extent of my experience with this firm.

The conversation I posted over several hours had NOTHING to do with Sentry, and everything to do with how I read the poster's comments about narrative vs. multiple choice questions.

So now you know. Just as the person who PM'd me wanted.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/20/2010 08:16AM by dee shops.

Dee: I'm sorta lost here. You are responding to a personal message in a public forum? Why? I know what document you are referring to, but I don't understand why you saw/edited it first. Are you an editor with Sentry or just sorta did a freelance edit for them?