Mystery Shopping or Mystery Audit is the process of reviewing a product or a place, such as a bank, commercial store, retail mall, hotel, restaurant, etc., by posing as a consumer or a customer. Their primary task is to review the product or place under research through the shoes of a customer, rate the object under study against different parameters, and measure the overall experience as a consumer or a customer.

Mystery Shopping or Mystery Audit is an important pillar of Market Research & Analytics. Mystery Shoppers are hired by companies to conduct periodic audits. They are well trained and certified to perform the mystery shopping or mystery audit. Mystery Shoppers primarily work for Mystery Shopping companies, which are retained by big FMCGs, Banks, and Corporates to review the customer experience of their end customers.

The primary objective of using Mystery Shopping in Market Research & Analytics is to identify the blind spots in a product or a place, evaluate the experience as a consumer or a customer, and provide a consolidated report generated by different Mystery Shoppers at different times and places to their Enterprise Customer, who has retained their service, so that they can improve on their consumer experience or customer experience.

Mystery Shopping and Audit services allow enterprises or businesses to identify the true consumer sentiment about a product or a place and improve their products or their services under research.

Audio / Video interviews of named customers allow the Mystery Shoppers to tap the voice of the customer and support their audit reports with in-situ audit findings.

Business Intelligence (BI) tools allow Market Research & Analytics professionals to slice and dice as well as visually analyse the structured data that is collected during the research to generate actionable insights. The BI and Data Analytics tools and services allow to build interactive dashboards for detailed analysis to identify patterns and trends in the collected research data.

Big Data Analytics allows to analyse the huge amount of unstructured data collected during market surveys as well as mystery shopping and audits through different channels across different demographic segments. It allows to generate a 360 degree view of the product or a place being researched.