Category: Shopper News

Contributed by mystery shopper Jennifer X

Mystery shoppers must remember all sorts of client-required details to fill out their reports. With pages of questions to answer and narratives to write, mystery shoppers can use all the help they can get recreating their experience.

There’s an app for that! Shoppers who have invested in Smartphone technology are at least one step ahead. There are apps to take notes, pictures, videos or audio recordings. Most voice recorders have time stamps, so coughing at the beginning and end of your shop can help determine how long it took. Don’t have a Smartphone? Can you text yourself? How about just calling your voicemail; you can leave your cell phone on during your shop and you’ll have a full account when you get home.

Confero is excited to introduce guest blogger, Cathy Stucker. Cathy is the author of The Mystery Shopper’s Manual, the best selling guide to being a successful professional mystery shopper and blogs about the mystery shopping industry on her blog, The Mystery Shopper's Manual.  Confero President, Elaine Buxton first met Cathy several years ago during a Gold Shopper Certification seminar held by the MSPA when Cathy was working as a trainer for the Gold Certification program.    

 by Cathy Stucker, MysteryShoppersManual.com

You just got back from shopping three locations of the same client. Each assignment used the same scenario, and they all went pretty much the same way. The temptation is to write the comments and narrative for the first shop, then copy and paste your words into the other two reports. A few changes of names and other details and you’re done, right?

Wrong! Although recycling is a good thing, recycling comments and narratives in your mystery shop reports is not. Not only do some shoppers do this when they shop multiple locations of a company in the same day, they may copy and paste comments from shops done for the same client in previous months, or even shops done for competing businesses in the same industry. I even heard about one shopper who copied and pasted comments from the sample report provided by the mystery shopping company.