I used to have no problems with this company about 3 years ago when I did numerous shops for them. They would always return Emails timely with any issues or questions I had with certain shops. Now, they have done a 180. I send them messages asking questions about a particular issue with a shop, and they don't return messages timely at all anymore.

Also, there was an issue with pay that came up, where they reduced any shop rate I had that had an increased rate, back to the original contract rate. This happened with 3 of my shops this month in which I had completed, and noticed they dropped it back down to the original offered rate on the site, which was too little for me to accept. Had I not noted the change on the Invoice, I would have never caught what they did. I am livid they did this, and sent messages inquiring about this 2 days ago which have gone unanswered.

Does anyone know what is going on with this company?

I gather there is a whole lot of internal change going on there. I don't know details, but there was apparently a Global Compliance email that indicated, "Service Intelligence mystery shopping section has been relocated to the Global Compliance home office in Charlotte, NC. Please feel free to register on the website, [www.experienceexchangecom], for future assignments. There are a variety of constant shops located in the United States and Canada." That was from mid March, I think.

Since about that time I have experienced numerous "issues" with their toll free fax machine not working, their website being slow or freezing, jobs being posted at unusual times, jobs accepted disappearing with a note later that the job numbers had to be changed and overall a sense that they are out of control. Thus far they haven't tampered with my pay and payments have stayed timely. I also have had no issues with response to VOX, but I send few of them. For now I am watching them very closely. I want/need for them to get back to the solid, consistent company they have been since I started working with them years ago.

Same thing happened to me with shops that were bonused going back to their original pay. I sent them messeges throught their Info Media link and had to wait about a week to get a response. But they did reply and fixed the issue.

Total bummer. I haven't had time to do anything for them since Dec., but Lillian is one of my fav schedulers in the world...I hope she is still there when the teaching semester ends for me on the 12th of May. She is the only scheduler who sent me a nice personalized thank you at the turn of the new year. I LOVE Lillian.

Why not send her an email (not VOX) response to her thank you and tell her when you will be available again. If she is not there it will probably bounce.

I used to get e-mails from her before, but they have stopped since a few months ago. Now I get e-mails from several other people. I was also wondering if she was gone.

I suppose if the company was based out of Colorado and EVERYTHING is being relocated to Canada right now, that accounts for part of it. And undoubtedly, a lot of people will lose their jobs who lived in Colorado, probably 99% of the office since I doubt many people will wish to move to Canada with the company. So I would say it is a safe bet just about all of the contacts we knew are gone. But still you would think this process would have been more organized.

I think the transfer is basically from Canada to North Carolina, but same difference. Probably not the kind of jobs you would cross national lines to pursue.

Flash Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I think the transfer is basically from Canada to
> North Carolina, but same difference. Probably not
> the kind of jobs you would cross national lines to
> pursue.


But I thought they were based out of Colorado 3 years ago or so. I stopped doing shops at that time and re-started. Did they move to Canada during that time?

SI to the best of my knowledge has always been in Canada. Even a number of years ago when I needed to call them it was a call into Canada. Sort of a PITA. And of course they did not issue 1099s because they were a Canadian company and therefore not required to do so. That all may change now that it is getting pulled into NC.

SI was based in Calgary, AB Canada. As previously mentioned, they were bought out a few years ago by Global Compliance based in Charlotte, NC. GC has decided to consolidate operations and, as a result, SI's Canadian offices have been shut down. The transition has not been particularly seamless, and e-mails and issues have been addressed sporadically, if at all.

I agree about Lillian, she is great I also received a personal email around xmas.I hope she is still there.I have not had any jobs in my area since last year.I also wonder what is going on ?

Communication has been spotty for me as well, which is not typical for them. I'm not sure if all CA offices have shut down yet. An Alberta CA phone number was on a March 2010 message I received from Accounting, though schedulers' recent messages have a NC number.

They are based in Canada. I as well, haven't seen my normal monthly jobs posted this month.
They always send me an email, not yet this month. I liked them, hope they will survive whatever changes are going on.

Has anyone had any problems submittig their bakery store receipts to them? I had two of my e-mails bounce back within the last two weeks. I tried to resend and got another bounce back. It states 'cannot connect to their e-mail server'. Hope they pay me for my shops.

They are no longer based in Canada and none of the old staff is there including schedulers.

AWW, that sucks. I too thought Lillian was great.

lisams901 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> AWW, that sucks. I too thought Lillian was great.


Seconded. It stinks because she was awesome. I am totally bummed to hear they no longer have her on staff.

I am upset by losing SI...they are now sending me lame jobs from locations I have never heard of. The ones in CA are literally miles from me. They called yesterday (a very lame scheduler) asking me if I'd please do this job (FF) same day. this was located in a place I'd never heard of, at least 100 miles from me. Seems they don't have a clue as to what there doing. Does this mean I now lose my favorite healthy mex place, didn't see it, nor did they email me to do it this month...geez!!!

Recently there has been quite a bit of consolidation occurring in firms providing quality control services. The general feeling among many CFO's in the corporate world is to forgo or trim mystery shopping until the economic climate improves. They minimalize the value that QC provides in favor of slashing expenditures to please shareholders and improve the bottom line. They regard it as elective surgery. Staff cuts are the major attraction in creating the synergy firms promote as the catalyst for most of these takeovers and/or consolidations. This industry is no different from so many others. We all bemoan lower fees, but the desperation prevalent in many businesses is a true barometer of things to come, and the reality of what lies ahead will not be pretty.

I view it a little more optimistically. In 'Go-Go' times a company does not need to be competent to make a profit. Competent companies often get left in the dust by the guys who take the wild and risky road with no idea what they are getting into. A recession or depression separates the men from the boys, so to speak. This round is only slightly different. Competent companies may pull in some of their outlyers during tough times, but is a consolidation from strength rather than desperation. If they can pick off dying companies for some of their assets, it can be a benefit in the long run. Synergy does not mean duplication, nor does it mean preserving the excesses of either company. Most every company has strengths somewhere and if those are not enough to keep them functional, then a purchasing company will be intelligent to cleave off that which is dysfunctional and keep the strengths.

I believe Global Compliance has owned SI for some time. That is not new. It is just the movement of the SI workload from Canada to NC that is new. I suspect there will be less Canadian clients for the now NC based SI and I suspect that there will be chaos for a while as folks learn how to handle the workload. Even a single scheduler change at a company I love to work for caused a lot of grief for me already this year. When you have a whole fruitbasket turnover of schedulers there can be nothing but chaos until things settle in.

On the other hand, my guess is that if the SI folks now unemployed in Canada get themselves organized, there could soon be the birth of a new MSP out there.

The movement could have (just specuating) been because they first lost the jobs then moved. The healthy mex lunch job I'm talking about has been with them since I started, no longer...that was a big job with many locations here in L.A. They seem to have some FF in extremely difficult locations, almost impossible to find shoppers. This tells me they are on a downward spiral.

They haven't lost any clients here so far. As a matter of fact they gained one last month.

I can't get into my account as I lost the password. I can't get anyone there to answer my email. Argh.

Dee I am in the same boat as you. I hadnt logged in quite awhile and either I have forgotten my password or I have been deleted. Sad as they were my very first company I started working for years and years ago. Would love to get in touch with someone there and get reinstated. Anyone have a contact email they can post for us?

Have you tried contacting contractor.support@globalcompliance.com? Or try doing a search on your email for the phrase "Welcome to the Service Intelligence!" That was the title of my acceptance email with them many years ago and I suspect it will not have changed. The email of course gave me my shopper number, etc. I suspect the greeting email was a canned presentation where phrases could be snagged to search on, but that is more likely to have changed over time.

The email I had was lost when my hard drive unexpectedly died a year ago. I had it saved in passwords in FF, but then this HD died on the 2 month old computer and I hadn't backed up the passwords. I tried contact to SI, but I hadn't tried logging in since the computer died in January until a few weeks ago as I was starting to look for work now that the semester is ending. Several contact attempts get me nothing from SI. I will try that one. Thank you for the info, Flash.

Your email is not web based? That is the beauty part of web based. You can slaughter your computer, throw viruses at it and still check your email from the library

I don't prefer web mail at all. In fact, I really really dislike web mail for personal reasons. I have a lot of teaching related emails that I want to keep, and I cannot use other email accounts for those, per policy, so I use Apple mail and download everything. I delete from the web when the other is too full. Gmail is not what I use for shopping, though I have it for other purposes, a couple of accounts. I download all and back up to mobile me, but that email was several years ago, before I had mobile me.

The daily emails I get to do these far away FF places are signed from Canada, not N.C.