Company Overview: GfK is a truly worldwide mystery shopping company with 25 offices in the United States alone. “With more than 15 years of North American and international mystery shopping experience, GfK Mystery Shopping specializes in helping our clients increase revenues, grow brand equity, build positive customer experiences and drive operational improvement.”
GfK conducts mystery shops in a variety of industries, including retail, financial, wireless telecom, restaurants, automotive, petroleum and convenience stores.
Personal Experience: I’ve done several of their restaurant shops. The reporting is not that difficult and I find the reimbursement generally covers the meal and tip. There are times where the emails announcing projects becomes very repetitive.
What Others Have to Say: There have been several posts at www.mysteryshopforum.com where shoppers complain about payment problems. In following the discussions to the end, it does appear that, in those instances where there was a legitimate error, the errors were corrected by GfK.
Another complaint is the volume of emails that come from GfK or their independent schedulers. I do agree with the excessive emails. There are days where I’ll receive 4 or 5 emails for the same project. It was also stated that GfK may not be fully optimizing all the functionality available in the Sassie System.
Shoppers are also varied in their opinions of the payments offered by GfK. Some feel the payments are in line with the job while others opine the fees are low for the work required.
Another frequent comment is that shoppers may not regularly shop GfK, but they will keep their shops in mind as fillers for a route.
Website: https://www.
Overall: GfK is a company that, in this author’s opinion, should be on every shopper’s list. Whether you regularly shop for them or not is another matter. There have apparently been some problems. At the same time, if the problem is a legitimate mistake, GfK is willing to make it right. While the frequent emails can be an annoyance—more than one shopper has complained of the frequency being so great that they have set their email programs to send GfK’s mail directly to their spam folder, I have noticed the number of emails decreasing compared to several months ago.
On a 1 to 10 scale, I would rate this company 7.75.