@thunderdeacon wrote:
My $50 to $75 offer last week probably wouldn't look so bad to them today. But I'm just not in that area anymore.
@loydrock wrote:
My bonused shops were cancelled and now there are only base rates on the board for 100 miles.
@Lorri Kern KSS wrote:
@thunderdeacon wrote:
There are 3 major gas station brands in my general area that are evaluated by Ipsos on a quarterly basis. This means that the end of March is a theoretical deadline for all three of them. One of them has been scheduled by Ipsos schedulers all along, one was with Kern and recently handed back to Ipsos, and one remains with Kern.
I have been given reasonable amounts of money to do very remote routes for the two projects that are with Ipsos. I asked for the same reasonable amounts for the same locations for the project that is still with Kern, and my request was denied. I am literally driving right by the kern-controlled locations as I am doing my route. If they would even give $50 for some I might consider it. But they won't. Certainly, it is their prerogative to say no, and it is my prerogative to pass them by. That said, we now have about a week left to get them done. How do they expect to get these locations shopped without going over the $30 amount? I just don't think it is possible. There are still so many locations on the board, and some of them are not even in remote locations. There are cities with multiple locations that are still sitting on the board at $30 a pop.
Remote routes take planning and take time. If kern doesn't start offering the amount of money required, they are going to run out of time. Especially since they are missing the boat with shoppers like me that could have helped them out if they had been reasonable. This project is also suffering from the move from the Maritz platform to Sassie, and they are taking more time to complete. Shoppers like me are also keener to continue to help out the schedulers that have been reasonable with them leading up to the end of the month as well. I explained this to Kern earlier in the quarter, and all I got back for my honesty was a nasty email telling me that I didn't know what I was talking about. Not surprisingly, that account was taken away from Kern and is currently paying reasonable amounts to get sites done. Now the last gas account they had is about to implode.
In all honesty, we are down to less than 1% open on the quarterly shops and 4% open on the monthly shops and still have 9 days left.
We have recruited more than 1050 shoppers into the IPSOS database and they are doing these shops for reasonable fees (reasonable meaning $15-$20).
We will get them done. You don't have to worry about that. We have been doing this for 23 years. We know how to cold call and recruit and that is what we are doing. We are given a budget by IPSOS. Believe me, if I had $50K sitting around, I'd give it to you guys, but I don't. I have what they tell me I have.
Please don't shoot the messenger. We are doing what we are paid to do, and that is to bring in the projects on time and within the budget that they give us. Blaming KSS is silly.
@Morledzep wrote:
I am also not having a good experience with Kern. I didn't in CA either, I quit scheduling through them back then, and now most of my income has been taken from me because Kern won't even respond me.
And my son went across country doing gas station shops, and had to reschedule a few and turn around before he got to the end of the route, now he can't get any shops assigned to him either. And it is the ONLY time he has ever dealt with Kern.
@SoCalMama wrote:
I think that what you are saying is that your son had a route assigned and had to reschedule a few locations. That's fine. The part about "turn around before he got to the end of the route," means that he took a route and didn't complete it. That is basically failing or flaking. So, if that is correct, he would not get scheduled for any more work.
I'm sorry, my condolences. Shopping isn't really going to take precedence over that.@Morledzep wrote:
What happened is that my son's girlfriend died.
@SoCalMama wrote:
I'm sorry, my condolences. Shopping isn't really going to take precedence over that.
@SoCalMama wrote:
For the gas stations on SASSIE. I input everything except the two receipts and any photos (usually zero) on my desktop. Then, I save it. I go to my phone and open the report. Then, I shoot the photos of the receipts directly into the report and hit submit. As long as you can get to a desktop within the allotted timeframe, it's a really fast way to do it.
@Morledzep wrote:
@SoCalMama wrote:
For the gas stations on SASSIE. I input everything except the two receipts and any photos (usually zero) on my desktop. Then, I save it. I go to my phone and open the report. Then, I shoot the photos of the receipts directly into the report and hit submit. As long as you can get to a desktop within the allotted timeframe, it's a really fast way to do it.
On the old MaritzCX platform I was managing to just barely get the shops done and debriefed in under an hour with my phone and my laptop. We learned to answer all of the questions and save the shop FIRST. Then use the laptop to upload all of the pictures, it still took a couple tries but it didn't kick us out as often and we stopped having to completely restart the shop from the beginning multiple times. And then they switched to Sassie, and it all went into the toity.. I tried doing one shop way down South, I got all of the pictures, and I got the shop 3/4 completed ONE time, and less than half way completed 3 or 4 other times. I gave up and drove home in the hopes that it was working here, it wasn't. In the end I had spent over 12 hours just trying in input ONE shop and never got it completed. There was some kind of internet glitch, neither of our hotspots worked, not in Southern Alabama and it was worse here at home in Northern Alabama. The phone company tech support was already closed and wouldn't open again until Monday. So I gave up. I haven't been able to successfully do a shop on the Ipsos Sassie platform yet, and I'm prepared to believe that it'll never happen.
I've done other Shopmetrics shops, and other MSC Sassie platform shops with no problem, on my laptop with my phone, in my car. But it never works right with Ipsos.
As mentioned above, I am doing the mystery shops, not the audits. If everything looks good, only two receipts are uploaded,@pambam57 wrote:
Come on, SoCalMama, do a webinar for us! How do you do that?? It takes me at least 30 minutes per shop to either do it on my phone - peering at the little photos to see pump numbers - or going home and uploading all the photos from my phone to the laptop/
@Morledzep wrote:
I believe that he should have continued to CA anyway, but I also understand that it might have been kind of raw for him to go there, especially after he hadn't been able to make it to her memorial service. And if the scheduler had said anything other than he understood, my son probably would have continued.
And for the record, it was a route that we made, each shop was applied for and assigned separately.