Mystery Shopping and Audit Services Editing and Proofreading Services

A shopper visits a branch, buys a coffee, and files a report that will be read by a regional manager who was not there. Somewhere in a chain of eight hundred sites, that report contributes to a score, the score contributes to a bonus, and occasionally the score contributes to somebody being managed out. The whole apparatus rests on whether an anonymous visitor's account of ten minutes is written well enough to be trusted.

We edit what mystery shopping and compliance audit providers produce — shopper briefs and assignment instructions, evaluation questionnaires and scoring guidance, narrative writing standards for shoppers, shopper training and calibration materials, audit protocols and compliance checklists, client reporting templates and dashboards commentary, benchmark and trend reports, evidence and verification standards, dispute and challenge procedures, programme design documents and proposals, franchise and multi-site audit documentation, and secret shopper recruitment and vetting material. Our editors work on the standard the evidence is held to.

The shopper's narrative is where a mystery shopping programme earns or loses its credibility, and the fix is a written evidence standard rather than more training. Left to their own judgement, shoppers write "the staff member was unfriendly" — a conclusion nobody can challenge, defend or coach against. We write these standards so every judgement in a narrative must be accompanied by the observable thing that produced it: not unfriendly but did not look up from the till, did not greet, responded to the question about allergens with "it's on the board"; so timings are recorded as clock times taken at the moment rather than estimated afterwards, since a shopper reconstructing an eight-minute wait in the car park is guessing; so the shopper reports what was said as close to verbatim as memory allows, in quotation marks, with anything reconstructed marked as such; so anything not observed is recorded as not observed rather than scored as absent, because a shopper who did not see the hand-washing did not witness a failure; and so the narrative and the score are required to agree, given that a glowing paragraph attached to a low score means one of them is wrong and the branch manager will find it. Programmes documented this way survive being challenged, which is the only test that matters.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including client programmes, site data and shopper reports. We are editors rather than research, compliance or audit practitioners, and we offer no view on methodology, scoring or any individual site or employee. What we can do is set an evidence standard the reports can be held to.