Most mystery shoppers will agree that mystery shopping is a pretty great job. We get paid to go into stores, restaurants, and more, enjoy reimbursements on purchases, and get our opinions on service, cleanliness, and more heard by higher-ups in the company who value what we have to say. Yet as great as mystery shopping is, there is one aspect of mystery shopping that many people struggle with. That aspect of the job is writing the reports at the end of each assignment. There are some things that you can do that will help you write these reports with speed and ease:
Read Your Assignment Requirements and Questionnaire Up-Front. You will find that almost every assignment you work on has detailed assignment requirements that essentially walk you through everything you need to pay attention to for the report. You will want to take some time up-front to commit the requirements to memory, and then ensure that you follow the requirements to the “T” during the site visit. In addition, you can often read through the report before you go on your site visit, too. It is critical to know what areas you will need to report back on as you are doing the site visit.
Provide Just Enough Details. It can be difficult to determine just how much information you need to provide on your report. Providing too little information can result in the provider coming back to you and asking for more information. Providing too much information can take up extra time in writing the report, and it can also result in the provider getting confused with the details and come back to you with questions. Neither is a desirable outcome, and so you will want to spend some time on your next few reports really paying attention to how much detail your providers are looking for. This can be more complicated than it sounds as each provider wants a different level of detail in the reports.
Review Your Work. The best way to save time in writing your reports is to get your reports approved on the first go-round. If you are constantly having reports sent back to you for revisions, this is eating away at your valuable time. This is time when you could be working on other assignments and earning more money! Sometimes simply taking five extra minutes to read through your report and tweak it here and there before you click the “submit” button can really make a world of difference. It is far better take those five minutes now while the details from the site visit are fresh in your mind than days from now when you are thinking about other assignments and have forgotten some of those important details.
In many cases, you should be able to fly through a report and get it written, reviewed, and submitted in less than fifteen minutes. Of course, every report is different, and some reports truly will take more time than this to complete in even the best of circumstances. If you are spending more than twenty or thirty minutes writing your reports regularly, or if your reports are constantly coming back to you for revisions, you are wasting valuable work time. Consider following these tips to save yourself some time writing your reports.