Company Overview: Headquartered in Londonderry, NH, The Troy Dolan Group is a full service, customer experience management firm. In June, 2007, they acquired Best Mark Audits (BMA) which will operate as the Mystery Shopping/Audit division of Troy Dolan. They expanded into the southeast with the 2010 acquisition of Customer 1st of Greensboro, NC.
The company is not accredited by the BBB in Londonderry, but they do have an A rating with no complaints having been registered against the company.
This company has a wide variety of shops, including shoes, banks, compliance, higher education, and many others. The pay for the shops seems, in general, to be commensurate with the work required. I find the reports to be fairly easy with some narrative required.
While I’ve had a lot of good to great experiences with schedulers, I had an absolutely fantastic experience with a Troy Dolan scheduler. About a week before Christmas, 2012, I get a call from a scheduler asking me if I can go to Charleston, SC to do three bank shops totaling $60. Charleston is a roughly 200-mile round trip. The scheduler told me up front that there was no money available for a bonus and she had a shopper from Georgia flack on these shops. I asked for consideration on some shops for 2013 and the scheduler agreed. I did the shops and everything was fine. Keep in mind, this was only discussed verbally, nothing was in writing.
A few months later I contacted the scheduler about doing both teller and banker shops at all six branches of the bank in Charleston. I not only got those, I also picked up a number of convenience store shops along the way. So doing a $60, basically break-even shop as a favor; got me the opportunity to do almost $400 worth of shops in a 10-hour day, including the reporting. I’ll admit, I don’t know if this was a fluke or not, and I don’t know if this is standard with all of Troy Dolan’s schedulers, but it was so nice to deal with a scheduler who’s word was better than a handshake.
Go to http://www.troydolan.com to register. They use a standard Prophet form and jobs can be self assigned. I have found their website is relatively easy to navigate.
In reviewing posts from www.mysteryshopforum.com, I have seen no complaints regarding payment from Troy Dolan. Their terms state that payment will be the 15th of the month following the month the shop was completed and published to the client. There is the caveat that if the shop is near the end of the month, payment could be delayed a month depending on how quickly the shop is reviewed, etc. I have never had a problem with this occurring.
I also haven’t noticed any complaints regarding the length of the reports, or the amount of detail required. I believe both are reasonable for the report length and the fees offered.