I've been reading back through this thread. I hadn't looked at it in a while. It's amusing, because CFA was the very first company I ever worked with. After a few jobs, my wife and I concluded that there were three or four college kids doing this business from a basement apartment somewhere to put themselves through school.
We thought it was great that these young people had found a niche and were able to make a living, so we were willing to overlook the lack of professionalism they showed.
Several times, we even considered writing to them and offering to help them with some basic organization and communication skills, since we both have extensive business management experience. We wanted to do whatever we could to help these promising entrepreneurs get a head start in the business world.
Then, we discovered that they were actually a real company, with real employees and a real office. Not only that, but they had a big chunk of the market share for many of niche markets.
We were, quite frankly, flabbergasted.
How could a company of that size, and doing that amount of business stay in business if the work they produced for their clients was as shoddy as the workmanship they showed in communications with us?
How could a company that shipped us 30 cases of phone cards instead of the 3 that they should have shipped, that spelled their own name wrong on their job instructions, That routinely sent out forms with the wrong date or the wrong address, that cancelled contracts halfway through, not just once but on an average of once a month, how could such a company stay in business?
And then, it dawned on us.
Many companies hire mystery shopping companies so they can improve their image, their product, or their service.
Many more do it for a vaiety of other reasons.
I was discussing it with a friend who was in regional management for a local hotel chain and he cleared some things up for me when he said:
"Mystery Shoppers, We hate those guys! It takes my attention away from taking care of my customers to have to deal with all that paperwork. But, The Owners say we have to do it, so we go with the cheapest company we can find and hope they get in and do their thing and get out as fast as possible."
Bingo!
Enter CFA, CRI, BestMark, and any other lowbid company that you can think of.
No wonder they stay in business. Nobody really cares. It's all just a charade to make some bean counter in a corporate office overseas happy.
Of course this doesn't apply to every company, or every contract, but sadly, I fear it applies more often that we want to believe.
Fortunately, there are the companies that do care, and they hire the MSC's that can spell their own names, and those MSC's are willing to pay a fair and honest fee for fair and honest work.
I kept hoping when MFI merged with CFA that we would see the professionalism shown by MFI bleed over. I'm really hoping that they just swallow CFA. But as long as they allow the purple portal to operate independently, as its' own little kingdom, I fear we will continue to see the same lack of basic professionalism.
Wow, didn't mean to go off on a rant here, I just started typing and all that came out....