The Mystery Shopper’s Manual

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You just spent more than an hour writing a detailed narrative report. You are almost finished when you click on what you think is the spellcheck button and . . . BAM! your report is gone, lost in cyberspace.

Has this (or something like it) ever happened to you?

I used to have a laptop that had a very sensitive touchpad. If you got anywhere near it, you could suddenly jump to another page, losing what you were working on.

There have also been a few occasions when a mystery shopping company had a system failure, and completed reports were lost. Shoppers were asked to resubmit their reports. If shoppers did not save copies, they had to completely redo all of their work.

There are some ways to protect yourself. First of all, many systems allow you to save your work as you go. Click that “save” button often as you work on your report.

Many shoppers prefer to write their comments in Word or another word processing program, then paste them in to the online report form. If you do that, be sure to save your work frequently. Also, most word processors allow you to set up an automatic save, so that your work is saved at an interval you set, such as every five minutes.

To set the automatic backup interval in Word, click on Tools, Options, then Save. Check Allow background saves, check Save AutoRecover info every: and enter the number of minutes.

One other thing to watch for when copying and pasting to an online form is that some characters (e.g., curly quotes) do not translate properly. You may get some odd, unexpected characters in your report. Proof carefully to avoid submitting a report with errors. Another way to avoid this is to copy from Word to a text editor, such as Notepad, and then to the web form.

Keep a copy of the report you submitted, in case any questions or problems arise. You may be able to save a PDF file of the report, or save the page by clicking on File, Save Page As. Watch out, though. Some reports do not display all of your comments on the page–they may have a scrolling box where only a portion of what you wrote is visible. Saving the page will not save the comments that can not be seen on the screen.

You can print a copy of the report, but that can use a lot of paper and ink. Plus, you may have the same problem with some of your comments not appearing on the printed page. Some shoppers copy and paste their reports into a Word or text document.

Avoid redoing your work by saving frequently and always keeping copies of what you submitted.