Category: Shopper News

Here at Confero, we get lots of questions from mystery shoppers asking how they can improve their shop ratings.  One easy way to improve your shop rating is to make sure you are providing a clean, concise mystery shop report every time.  Here is a list of the Top Six Mistakes to Avoid When Completing a Mystery Shop Report:

1. Copying and pasting shop information.   Each mystery shop is unique, so each mystery shop report should be unique to each individual shop.  Our clients do not accept reports with copied or “canned”comments, as they expect each unique mystery shop/audit visit’s conversation to be reported individually. That’s what they are paying for. Copied or canned comments imply that the mystery shopper did not make the required observations or give them full attention.  For more details about this, see Cathy Stucker’s blog about all the “Dangers of Copy and Paste.”

Our mystery shoppers may have noticed that over the past year, Confero has seen a big increase in clients requesting audits of their location.  Audits are usually used by large companies or corporations with multiple locations, often nationwide. Audits provide a simple way for companies to manage the image they are presenting to customers in all their locations. 

Audits usually require auditors to visit the assigned location and do any of the following items:

1. Take an inventory of particular products.  Companies want to ensure that their shelves are properly stocked at all times.  And sometimes, they are auditing their competitors, so they want to be able to compare what their competitors have in stock.  In a recent program, one of our clients had auditors visit grocery stores to take inventory particular brands of products.  They wanted to know how much shelf space was designated for their product, as well as their competitors.

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.