nop.co.uk

NOP is one of the foremost providers of market research in the UK. Before I’d even heard the words, “mystery” and “shopping” in the same sentence, I’d heard of NOP. Some of the surveys offered on this site are managed by NOP and so it will probably come as no surprise to anyone to find that NOP has a fairly well developed mystery shopping division. When I first decided to have a go at this mystery shopping malarkey, ...
...details. This seems to be a fairly common thing with mystery shoppers – the online management system, ease of application and availability of assignments seems to attract people here before they go anywhere else.

How can I get involved then?

The entire registration and application process is managed through the site’s web presence. It’s fairly easy and effective and given the size of the company, I’m ... more

NOP is one of the foremost providers of market research in the UK. Before I’d even heard the words, “mystery” and “shopping” in the same sentence, I’d heard of NOP. Some of the surveys offered on this site are managed by NOP and so it will probably come as no surprise to anyone to find that NOP has a fairly well developed mystery shopping division. When I first decided to have a go at this mystery shopping malarkey, NOP was the first company with whom I registered my details. This seems to be a fairly common thing with mystery shoppers – the online management system, ease of application and availability of assignments seems to attract people here before they go anywhere else.

How can I get involved then?

The entire registration and application process is managed through the site’s web presence. It’s fairly easy and effective and given the size of the company, I’m guessing that it keeps things to a manageable level for NOP. You can find the web site at http://www.cybershoppers.nop.co.uk.

The company stipulates a few requirements for you to be able to conduct assignments for them. Your operating system needs to be either Windows or MAC. You need to have your own email address and your own Internet connection and a printer. Realistically, you could manage quite comfortably if you had all these things at work, or in the library or you had access to an Internet café. But having them all yourself is, of course, ideal.

There are five stages to an application, as follows:

 Follow the applications link from the home page and fill out a basic application form. Your application could be rejected at this stage if you are deemed to be unsuitable.
 Having passed this stage you are assigned a reference number with which you can then return to the site and proceed to the next stage – to conduct a dummy assignment.
 If the assignment is deemed to be suitable, you then go through some online training, with a test that you must pass. Acceptance at this stage means that you are pretty much there. You then have to submit your bank details.
 You will then be posted a P46 and a set of terms and conditions. Fill them out and return them to NOP.
 Once received, you will finally be allocated a username and password. You will then be ready to accept, undertake and complete assignments online.

It sounds fairly rigorous and to be fair, compared to other agencies, it is. I can respect the company’s position in attempting to screen their future employees, but given that work is offered on a voluntary and freelance basis I do wonder whether such a stringent application is entirely necessary.

A few points to note. NOP now restricts applicants according to any particular need in their registered database. At the moment, for example, they are only recruiting assessors aged between 18 and 25. They have said that this may change in the future but at the moment anyone aged 26 or over will be rejected at stage one. In the company’s newsletter, they have also stated that they will now only be recruiting in specific postcodes where the number of active shoppers is too low.

Some suggestions for improvement:

 I would suggest that only stages two and three are really necessary. Completion of a suitable dummy assignment will show that you have the right idea. Likewise, completion of an online training module should demonstrate the right level of understanding. I’m a big fan of things that are very simple – there is certainly room for improvement here.
 I’d like to see an incentive scheme for registered shoppers to recruit friends according to the required ages or postcodes. This strikes me as a good way of getting the people they need and rewarding existing registered shoppers.

How is work allocated?

Work is allocated according to the postcode of the particular shop that is being offered. My understanding is that the system will make assignments available to the shopper in the database who most closely fits the client’s requirements. This would include sex, age group, postcode, registered interests and household income. If this shopper either rejects the assignment or does not respond within a certain time period, the assignment goes down the list to the next person. This isn’t always the case, however. Some assignments are clearly offered to a number of shoppers at once, as I have sometimes responded to an invite immediately only to find that the assignment has gone.

So, if the database decides that you are a match, the assignment appears on your home page under the link Visits Available and you are then emailed that work is available. You can then follow the link, see if it takes your fancy and then either accept or decline. Accepted assignments then appear on your scheduled visits – rejected visits disappear into the night for someone else to find.

If there is a very urgent need to fill a slot in your area, you can expect to receive a call from the NOP call centre asking if you are available. In such cases, the visits will still be allocated to you online but the arrangement is generally made over the phone. Regrettably, NOP offers no facility to pick up assignments throughout the country unless you fancy contacting the call centre each day to say that you are available.

Suggested Improvements

 A regular traveller such as myself could be quite useful to NOP as I might be able to pick up work around the UK at short notice. The company currently offers no facility to do this easily and I would suggest some sort of notice board or email distribution list recording unfilled imminent assignments.
 I would like the email notification to tell me the location of the available shop. 9 times out of 10 it is somewhere that I wouldn’t want to do and would rather not have to go to the trouble of logging into find out.

What sort of work is allocated?

NOP offer a number of assignments for various clients, with differing pay rates and levels of interest. Mobile phone shops are very common, as are snack bars. Some of the major high street chains also use NOP, as well as some key municipal authorities. NOP’s clients have regular cycles of activity, sometimes monthly and sometimes quarterly and as such over time, you will start to see the same assignments cropping up on a regular basis. None of the assignments is difficult to do – the usual list of details to be recorded as well as a breakdown of your experience. With shops you are generally asked to make small test purchases, which you can keep and claim as an expense. Other assignments include contacting call centres to discuss pensions or loans and these will only carry a standard fee. The best assignments involve visiting restaurant and/or hotel chains where as well as a nominal fee you receive a generous food and accommodation allowance.

I have to say that most of the NOP assignments are pretty dull. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve yet to find any mystery shopping assignment that is stimulating. Some visits, however, can be more unusual but with NOP things tend to be very straightforward. To be fair, however, the fees generally reflect the level of detail/work required – some of the assignments are literally five minutes’ work.

Some ideas for improvement:

 The company doesn’t strike me as actively trying to engage new clients. They may want to consider investing in some marketing activity to keep things going. I should imagine that a lot of registered shoppers have grown tired of the work.
 If they are going to keep the same clients, they should encourage greater variety of scenarios from one cycle to another.
 I understand that in some areas, assignments are few and far between due to the number of active shoppers in that postcode. Selective recruitment will help ease this but I would also suggest allocation of assignments in a measured way to ensure everyone gets a fair crack of the whip – or deleting inactive shoppers from the database.

Using the Web Site

Everything to do with your mystery shopping work is managed through the web site. Once you’ve accepted an assignment, you have to read through some instructions and then complete an online test. Once this is passed, you can the print off a copy of the instructions and a paper copy of the actual questionnaire that needs to be filled in. The instructions tend to be very simple and clear. Where you are expected to provide more than a yes/no answer, for example, a little pencil icon is shown. The only trouble I sometimes have is that the questionnaires are displayed using an Acrobat file, which becomes corrupt when I try to print it. I think this is probably because of the particular printer drivers that I am using, as I don’t have the problem on other machines.

Once you’ve gone away and done your assignment, you are then expected to report your results online. This is simple enough in that the web site presents everything in the same layout as the printed questionnaire, so you can literally copy your answers line by line.

The web input does have some very irritating foibles. Firstly, if your browser crashes, whilst your work is saved up until the last screen you confirmed, you have to go through all the previous responses until you can carry on inputting from the last point you got to. Secondly, when you’ve finished, the questionnaire is checked and if there are any potential conflicts you get an error message. For example, if question 2a should be YES if question 1a is NO and you have entered NO, then the system will throw this up as an error. This is basically a good idea, but sometimes it seems to become corrupt as I have found instances where the answers definitely aren’t conflicted. In any case, you can actually over-ride the answer anyway, which kind of defeats the object. If you get to the over-ride stage, then the browser crashes and send you back to the beginning you’ll be inclined to throw your computer out of the nearest window.

Once you’ve navigated past that, you enter in your expense claim and then submit – everything else should happen automatically.

Suggestions for improvement:

 The web questionnaires would be a lot better if they had built in logic testing. In the YES NO scenario suggested above, it would be a lot easier if such things were checked as you went along automatically as you would spot your mistake straight away.
 The web questionnaires are currently broken into a number of different screens. This can add to the time taken to complete if you are using a dial-up connection, as you have to wait for each section to be submitted before you can continue.

What can I expect to earn?

Well, there are no fortunes to be made here, but a bit of pin money is certainly available. Assignment fees range from between £4 and £10, with most sitting at around £7. It’s not a lot of money, to be honest, and reinforces why people give up if they only get one or two assignments a month, especially when you consider that you will get taxed on top of that. For hardened mystery shoppers, I’m guessing that when coupled with other assignments, NOP is a useful addition, but for myself, I really only pick the ones that seem worth doing. I like the hotel and restaurant visits but otherwise, I’m not terribly keen.

The only exception to this is when assignments are offered at the last minute. This is normally because the original mystery visitor has let them down and they have an urgent deadline to fulfil. This can boost the £6/£7 visits to £10 or more, according to how shrewd a negotiator. I often get called up for one particular client who is literally on my travels, so I’d be stupid to turn down £10 for doing virtually nothing.

Additionally, you can also claim a mileage rate for any travel you have to make or claim back bus/train fares to get to the shops. You can also claim for reasonable sundry expenses, such as postage and printing. Few other agencies allow you to claim for so much, so NOP are pretty good in this respect.

Improvement area:

 NOP’s ability to pay higher fees strikes me as being a crucial factor in the company’s ability to keep up with the competition. Current wages are probably broadly in line with the minimum wage – this really isn’t enough to attract people on a freelance basis.

How are payments made?

Payments are paid directly into a bank account and as a rule, far more quickly than any other agency I am aware of. They make payments for completed assignments every two weeks, so you never have to wait long to get your moolah. They never seem to make any mistakes either – my fees and expenses have always been paid on time and in full. You get a payslip for weeks when payments are made into your account and there are also bizarre pro-rata arrangements for holiday pay. Last week I got a pay slip for 4p worth of holiday pay. Hmmm.

Suggestions:

 NOP’s payslips really get on my nerves. Every assignment that you complete has a Visit Identification Number or VIN, yet there is no reference to this on the payslip so you can’t tell what you’ve been paid for. I can only deduce it easily because I probably do one assignment here and there. If you did lots, you would have trouble tracking which one was which.
 I don’t understand why they manage everything online and then send paper payslips – could they not be offered online as well?

Customer Support

The NOP customer support team is fairly large and service is therefore fairly good. There is a free number for general queries and problems – although you generally have to leave a message and wait for a call back. The generic email account is another way to get in touch, and if you send a question through you normally get a response fairly quickly. Sometimes, you need to speak to specific account managers in relation to a particular client and this can sometimes take a few attempts. The NOP staff members with whom I’ve had contact have generally been very helpful and pretty easy to deal with. I’m glad to say that they don’t treat you like an idiot, as a starter.

There is also a dedicated team to deal with queries related to pay. I once needed to make query about my bank account and someone got straight back to me after I left a message.

So there are no real complaints from me here in this area.

Overall Verdict

NOP are efficient, reliable and straightforward – you know where you stand with NOP. They are, however, as dull as ditch water and I’d be really surprised if there were any real devotees to the NOP cause. There isn’t much variety in the work, the assignments pay minimal fees and the work is snooze-worthy. But that wouldn’t stop me recommending them, at least for anyone interested in having a go at some fairly simple mystery shopping work.

Recommended – as far as they go.
 

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