As a business owner or entrepreneur, there is a long list of circumstances that can jeopardize the stability of your company. Especially during these uncertain times, your client relationships, reputation, and internal trust and is key! While we are all expending time and resources to maintain or restore balance, you may be ultimately missing a key factor in the equation.  With crime at an all time high, learn how another, unforeseen situation may be lurking in the shadows and hurting your profitability!

Do you notice a mysterious drop in inventory? Suspect sabotage? Experience mysterious vandalism? If you endure any sort of behaviour that makes you question the behaviour or integrity of your staff, it’s critical to act quickly to prevent long-term impacts to your business.

Here is Where Private Investigators Come In! 

Businesses across Toronto have been relying on the experience and long-standing popularity of Star Quality Private Investigations® Corporate Investigation Experts to serve as an Undercover Boss, planting themselves within your place of business to help reveal whether your suspicions are justified. In this post, we share the operative and process of the Undercover Boss and share some on-the-ground insight from Toronto’s Top Private Investigator Team!

How Do I Know if I Need an Undercover Boss? 

Should you feel as though your business may be compromised in any way, an Undercover Boss can expose the answers you need to help you restore function to your optimal capacity. When serving within any corporate investigation operation, a Private Investigator  will invest the time to immerse themselves within your company policies and processes to know what is expected of your staff as well as how they should be engaging within the workplace and with your clients. Depending on the industry or the nature of the concern, the Undercover Boss Investigator can pose as a client, a staff member or as a potential customer.  This allows you to have boots on the ground, to objectively assess how your frontline workers are handling your business.  There is massive value to our Corporate Clients to view firsthand how the delivery of service, management, or production processes is positively or negatively impacting the business.

The operative of the Private Investigator, when serving as an Undercover Boss, is to Improve the Overall Operations of Your Business. 

 While Undercover Boss Private Investigators can be used within virtually any industry, they are particularly effective within businesses that rely on customer engagement and interaction, such as the retail industry. There is always room for improvement, and our hidden video camera footage and detailed written  reports often act as a learning tool for upper management.   While customer reviews can offer some insight into the effectiveness of your customer service staff, they only offer a limited view of the full picture. Only an Undercover Boss Investigation can provide Fully Objective Feedback on the quality of your frontline staff, assessing their performance to a degree than can only be done through these means. The Undercover Boss Investigator is meticulous in their evaluation, taking note of whether the employee smiled, made eye contact, behaved in a warm, professional manner appropriate to your company culture as well as closed the sale or engagement in an equally polite manner. This kind of information is intangible and are rarely communicated within a Google Review!

Our Corporate Investigator Experts also evaluate the level of service provided by your front-line staff.  An Undercover Boss can also be instrumental in Looking at Your Business Through A Different Lens, identifying the not-so-obvious flaws that may be hurting your bottom line. Take this real-life scenario from a Corporate Investigation performed by Toronto’s Star Quality Private Investigations® team:

A high-end Toronto clothing store was frustrated by the loss in revenue from what they assumed to be consumer theft. To mitigate any further losses, the store invested in a new high-tech tagging system for all merchandise and increased the security in-store. Yet, despite these costly measures, items continued to go missing.  The store finally decided to seek the help of an Undercover Boss Investigator. SQPI’s Team quickly revealed the kink in the chain; items were being regularly and stealthily stashed away by three individuals, two mangers and one employee.  Upon almost every arrival of shipments at the flagship store, our Undercover Agent was able to discreetly capture the operation on camera and legal measures were able to be taken quickly. So many losses, particularly within large businesses or corporations, are the result of Fraudulent Internal Activity, but it takes a keen eye to seek out the less obvious faults.

Below are some of the other most common ways in which an Undercover Boss Private Investigator can help within your business:

  • Client Experience & Interaction with frontline workers
  • Undercover Surveillance
  • Performing Integrity Audits & Compliance Audits
  • Gathering Competitive Intelligence
  • Sales and Service Evaluations
  • Investigating Employee Fraud
  • Merchandising Verification & Product Pricing Audit
  • Employee Screening and Background Checks
  • Blue & White-Collar Theft
  • Compliance of remote working engagements
  • Honouring fiduciary duties, including NDA and Non-Competes

Insider Insight from Star Quality Private Investigations®

Star Quality Private Investigations® has, for over two decades, been helping small to medium businesses and Fortune 500 Companies across Toronto expose holes within their operations that may be impacting their reputation, bottom line and company culture.

“Many companies will hire us for Corporate Investigation Services to help find holes in their service delivery chain, particularly huge corporations with front line staff selling a service or product. As an Undercover Boss, we’ll approach the business as either a consumer or employee, and will meticulously document the experience from start to finish. Beyond this, our Team provides the client with an analysis on how they can do better, and if there are potential legal ramifications to the existing service model -THIS is the true value-add of our service. Based on our recommendations, our clients develop or apply their own solutions, and witness firsthand the positive changes in their operations.

What we’re seeing now, more than ever within Canadian businesses, is the abuse of power and privileges of people in authority, what we like to call White Collar Crime.  This includes charging unwarranted expenses, or “double dipping” by engaging in other businesses outside of the partnership, which will cost a corporation hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our Undercover Agents are all former Police Detectives and are our frontline experts when it comes to seeking out this form of Corporate Fraud. Our frequent feedback from clients is “I wish we hired you sooner”.

There are also so many companies getting repeatedly sued for very preventable issues. Investing in the services of an experienced Private Investigation Team as a proactive measure is an extremely affordable alternative, allowing you to prevent these legal hiccups which can end up absorbing incredible amounts of time, money, and internal resources! What I’d like every struggling business owner to know is that There Is Recourse: you don’t need to break the bank for quality intel! The investment in our Private Investigation services is always returned ten-fold when our clients are able to successfully mitigate major backdoor and fraudulent losses!”

Steve O. Director of Corporate Investigations, Star Quality Private Investigations® 

Ready to learn more about how Toronto’s leading Private Investigation Team can help your business refine your operations and reach your goals for 2020?

Reach Out to Us Today!