Cassiespark, thank you for your suggestion to contact Jenny Goldsmith. I guess your previous post was deleted for having the domain name within her email address, but I got it anyway. Thank you.
@Cassiespark wrote:
This is interesting! So you check in on your laptop when filling the report out?
But to answer your previous question, yes, I check in on my laptop to submit reports after having done a group of shops within a day. So the check-in location, in my case, is not going to reflect the location of any given gas station. It’s going to reflect the location of either my home, a hotel room, a public library, or maybe a McDonalds, etc. They are still able to verify that I was at the correct location by looking at the address printed on my receipts, as well as how the photos are geotagged.
Once upon a time, we didn’t have the Presto App, and it was a different mystery shop company that had the gas station clients. Back then, they called their platform Virtuoso, and you were expected to print out several pages worth of mystery shop questions to answer while you were on site doing the mystery shop. I never did this because I found it to be hugely inefficient, and a waste of paper. What I did instead was develop my own system for collecting data and submitting it, and I found this to be much easier than doing it the other way.
Then the current mystery shop company acquired the gas station clients, from what is now the previous mystery shop company, and Presto was created. I didn’t stop using the system that I had developed in the past for doing things. I just made some modifications to it here and there to get it work alongside of the Presto platform.
A benefit of doing this, and using a system that does not require a internet connection over one that does is that you can do mystery shops anywhere, and it’s not a problem. I can be doing mystery shops out in the wilderness areas of West Virginia where there is no signal at all. It can be done in areas where signal might be spotty such as at gas stations near certain Indian reservations, or the ones near the Canadian border, or in various places in the “flyover” states to the West. So this is what I have stuck with over the years, and hadn’t had a problem with doing so – until now, with this one reviewer.
And that’s a problem with the Presto Check-in feature. It was touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread when it first came out, but if you are in a place where there is no signal, it’s not going to work. These situations used to be addressed within the shop guidelines for the gas station clients by saying that if you run into these situations, don’t worry about checking in, just collect the information you need, and submit it later. And then at some point that was dropped from the guidelines with it just not really being addressed anymore. But I have still done things the way I have always done them.