Mystery Shopper Insights (MSI)
The Need for Mystery Shopping
Indian retail is witnessing a paradigm shift with modern retail slowly replacing traditional forms of retailing. This trend is visible not just in urban India but rural areas as well. Competition is increasing between various Indian and International players vying for a share of Indian shopper’s wallet.
In this context, a customer’s in-store experience is becoming increasingly important for any retail marketer. High quality of services rendered in the outlet act as a differentiator for the marketer. It also enhances loyalty, generates positive word-of-mouth and saves costs for the retailer!
Mystery shopping is now being used by many organizations to evaluate their in-store service standards and conformity to the processes. Trained shoppers anonymously evaluate infrastructure, processes, service delivery, customer service, operations, employee integrity, merchandising and product quality. The shoppers independently audit processes & staff, giving constructive actionable input for improvement of service delivery.
Objectives of Any Mystery Audit Program
- To check conformance to guidelines for service delivery as laid-out by the retailer leading to the following:
- Identifying high & low conformance units
- Specifying service delivery improvement areas
- Benchmarking against service delivery by competition
- Creating a baseline for future monitoring
- To measure the effectiveness of training imparted to employees
- To recognize good employees based on findings of the audits
- To measure the extent of brand advocacy by multi-brand outlets
- To audit prices through a pre-designed negotiation process and determine market operating prices
Mystery Shopper Insights (MSI)
Specialist team at IMRB International has experience with nearly 30 regular mystery shopping programs conducted across diverse sectors. By Mystery Shopping Insights, IMRB helps managers in both tactical and strategic decision-making processes and also in improving the quality of services provided at the outlet.
IMRB has a team of 40 researchers across Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore who design and manage mystery shopping studies. In addition, we have an excellent pool of trained mystery shoppers with experience of working across various product categories.
On 2nd April 2011, all the cricket websites attracted a little more than 4 Mn Indian fans. On an average, an Indian fan spent 38 Mins on these websites. The busiest timeslots during the day was between 12pm – 6pm, wherein 3.0 Mn visitors navigated through Internet for accessing cricket-related content. In the other half of the match in the evening (6pm – 12 am) there were a little more than 2 Mn fans that used Internet to get updates for the match.
The Indian fans on the day of the finals match, between India and Sri Lanka (i.e. on April 2nd, 2011), visited different websites. About 1.73 Mn of them visited Espnstar.com/cwclive; followed by 1.7 Mn visiting the Espncricinfo.com. Cricket.yahoo.com attracted 1.6 Mn and nearly 0.3 Mn visited Cricbuzz.com. Overall,
The time they spent on the above websites was quite varied. 
While an average Indian fan was glued to Espnstar.com/cwclive for 41 Mins, they were on Cricbuzz.com for nearly half an hour. An average fan spent 25 mins on Cricket.yahoo.com and 21 Mins on Espncricinfo.com.
