A special note: I was a journalism major in college. The first thing I learned as a college as a cub reporter doing a regular beat on the college campus was who, what, when, where and how. I was also introduced the little booklet that has been the vanguard of newspaper editors and reporters; Strunk and White, The Elements of Style. If you truly want to write the best reports, buy a copy of The Elements of Style. If you don't have the money or you don't want to wait for the book to arrive. There is an online version of the PDF version Struck and White, the Elements of Style
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faculty.washington.edu]
If you don't really have the time to download or bookmark the page for reference, print it out, the use one of the 18,800,000 bookmark search results found in Google, Use Microsoft Word to check your spelling, and to check your grammar.
When working as a cub reporter on the college newspaper, nothing would drive my editor up wall more than to have to do a rewrite of my syntax, punctuation, and description of what I was reporting. (Spoiler Alert: Your reviewer will not correct your punctuation, your syntax nor will they try to second guess what you missed in the report.)
Most of the time, the schedulers will not see the report you submit. Most of the time when you hit the submit button the report is sent directly to the reviewer. The reviewer probably has more reviews to do than yours, and if your report is over twenty-four hours old it becomes a SNAFU. If your report is forty-eight hours old it becomes FUBB. And finally it becomes SUSFU if your report is over seventy-hours old.
I'm going to guess that some of you may have had military training. Usually when you get a report that is returned that you thought was the best thing since Ernest Hemingway, you say to yourself; Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
(if you're not sure what these acronyms mean, use Google. If you are ex-military then you already know what these acronyms mean.)
Consider your reviewer as an editor of newspaper. They want accuracy, they want descriptions. I use Dropbox for all of my reports. Every one of my Mystery shops has a folder. If I have XYZ mystery shop as that folder, I will have ABC Restaurant. In the UVW Mystery Shop, I will have DEF Restaurant in that folder. It doesn't matter if it is a text file, a PDF file, a JPEG file, all those files will be contained in the mystery shop folders.
And finally, never, ever let your report go twenty-four hours old. I make it a point to sit down and write my report two or three hours after the shop and use MS Word for each block section of the report. I have MS Word read it back to me so it sounds right. After MS Word has shown punctuation and syntax errors and I have edited both, I will copy and paste it into the proper report box and save the MS Word file with the shop number and comment line of the report in case a SNAFU does happens. .
If you let your report go twenty-four hours, you're asking for a SNAFU, if you let your report go for forty-eight hours you have a FUBB. If your report is over seventy-two hours old it's a SUSFU. And then the the mystery shop thinks Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and considers removing you as a shopper.
I was a was a sales man for a number of years and I apply the law of thirds. Like Planck's constant, it is a constant in sales and customer service. If you have twelve reports sent there is a possibility that three will be returned for further review. Always remember that.
Always remember, the scheduler always has someone over them, usually the reviewer. The reviewer always has someone over them, usually the client.
Michael G.
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 05/29/2016 05:16PM by windmillchaser.