CRTC plans to keep monitoring telecoms through new ‘secret shopper’ program

The CRTC appears to be preparing for a new secret shopper project that will monitor the sales practices of telecommunications companies in Canada. A tender notice posted to the federal government’s procurement listings on Friday morning states that the regulator is seeking “a firm that can collect high quality data using reasonable and believable scenarios.” That company will be tasked with deploying undercover “customers” to retail stores for Canadian telecommunications providers, and will also look into sales tactics online and over the phone. Those secret shoppers will assess if companies’ sales practices are “perceived as clear, simple, and not misleading,” and the ways in which companies approach sales with different demographic groups, including customers “who may be more vulnerable due to their age, a disability, or a language barrier.” This is not the CRTC’s first use of a secret shopper program — the commission raised the idea in 2019, and deployed its first project from late 2019 to early 2020, with a focus on big telecoms like BCE Inc., Telus Corp., and Rogers Communications Inc. The new secret shopper program will likely be larger in scale: additional tender documents describe it as a “multi-year project,” with the CRTC willing to spend a maximum of $480,000 on the project. It will cover major brands, including flanker brands, and the CRTC specifically requests that the program look into particular findings from the first secret shopper project, such as a finding that women were subjected to greater sales pressure than men. It will cover all geographic areas of Canada, including the North, which was excluded from the first project. Secret shoppers will be required to seek out a range of services from telecoms, including upgrading or downgrading existing plans, cheap plans, and accessible plans for people with disabilities. The CRTC expects that the first secret shoppers will be deployed between March and May 2021, with a final report due in September 2021; a similar schedule would be repeated in subsequent years.

CRTC plans to keep monitoring telecoms through new ‘secret shopper’ program

Brief | December 11, 2020

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CRTC plans to keep monitoring telecoms through new ‘secret shopper’ program

Brief | December 11, 2020

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