Hi Folks,
I am in my first month of mystery shopping. I have a time getting everything right on Fast Food Shops. I have done cell phone shops, bank, theater, retail shops, compliance shops, fine dining shops and have no problem. Does anyone have any helpful pointers in doing fast food. I seem to do much better on shops that require more of a narrative. Also do most schedulers realize that you are new at it....and give a litte grace????

Schedulers giving a little grace to new shoppers is more a matter of character of the scheduler, so few generalities can be said for that. I would suspect, however, that they are much more encouraging to shoppers in hard to fill locations.

With the fast food shops, it all does happen very quickly. At the same moment you are counting open registers, number of people ahead, timing how long it takes to get greeted and timing how long it takes to get your food in addition to names and descriptions. You don't dare leave the line to run take notes from the time you enter it to the time you get your food. It is part of the reason I got a DVR. I could stand aside before entering line and record a description of the associate whose line I was going to and say 'line' to the DVR when I joined the line so I had my timing start. I then would say '3' if there were 3 people ahead. The voice noise right before I responded to a greeting marks the line time to greeting. I used the name of the employee "Thanks Linda" to get the name to go with the description of the cashier and the voice noise right before I said "Thanks Beverly" gave me the delivery time and the name of the delivery person. At home I could use a stopwatch or the counter on the DVR to determine seconds between key events. I wear an external microphone in my bra, so a dip of my head has me speaking directly to the microphone. It has been quite a while since I did any of these shops so requirements and time points may have changed, but at least it gives you an idea of how a DVR can be a valuable tool. I do look at employee name tags and try to use them in the pleasantries so I have them on the recording. I know that is not what regular customers usually do, but I feel I can get away with it as an 'old lady'.

From one old lady to another....sounds like a plan...can you tell me, Flash, the brand of equipment you are using and where to purchase. I am a bit challenged in the technology area....my 16 year old grandson helps me a lot. I did invest in a pocket recorder but the background noise is a problem . Thanks for all the wonderful info...

I'm using a very old SONY ICD-MX20 with an external microphone. Many folks have had good luck with other brands. I am enough of a SONY fan that when I spotted an ICD-PX720 on the clearance table at Office Max for about $40 I bought it as a back up for when my ICD-MX20 eventually dies. I have not yet opened the package because my current DVR just keeps going.

For me the critical pieces of this are: I must be able to upload the voice files to my computer; I must be able to use an external microphone and I must be able to use rechargeable batteries. All of these have adequate storage space for a day's route of shops and I want to be able to copy those files to my computer before erasing the DVR to use it again. (My new-in-package one claims it will record 288 hours, but I need less than 8 hours of high quality recording.)

Some of the more modern DVRs hook directly into the USB port on your computer. Mine hooks to a cable into the USB port. Generally it is a whole lot easier and clearer to listen to playback on your computer with larger speakers than on the tiny speakers on a DVR. It is generally also a lot easier to jump around within a recording using the provided on line software.

My SONY uses a .msv format for files, but there is readily available (from SONY) free software to convert the files to MP3 or WAV or whatever format is desired when I am "officially" recording a shop. I do very few of those and only for companies I trust to have done their due diligence to make sure that appropriate permissions have been received by the client for there to be 2 party consent.