Mystery shopping

Market Summary

Mystery shopping is a way for evaluation by using trained shoppers to investigate customer service, operations, employee integrity, merchandising and product quality. Mystery shopping service is a growing industry with about 1.5 billion US dollar world-wide. The clients are including retailers, financial institutions, manufacturers, franchise operations, hotels, restaurants, promotions agencies, transportation systems and many more. Most clients use mystery shopping services focused on improving customer service than on disciplining bad employees.

In North America, with a population of around 3000 million, nearly everyone spends some money on clothes each year. Assuming the amount is 200 on average, it means a market of 60 billion dollars. The clothes satisfy the wearer's need for warmth and self-expression as well. The demand for clothes is highly diversifying. On the other hand, consumers can become very associated to their clothes. Brand loyalty plays an important role in consumer's behaviours. It costs ten times more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one.

One customer suffering bad service will tell five people about the unhappy experience. People prefer trusting the words from their families and friends than the promotional advertisements. According to the research, the reasons for customers leaving include: 69% for poor customer service, 13% for poor product quality, 9% for competitive reasons and 9% for other reasons. In apparel retail business, when location, pricing and product assortment cannot be unique, service is the key to success or failure.

Our service is focused on the mystery shopping in clothing retail industry, which include both local and online shops, nationally and internationally. We use mystery shopping methods including: in person and on-site shopping; category telephone shopping; e-commerce online shopping; hidden video or audio recording; purchase / return shopping; and discrimination testing. Our investigation will provide in-depth perspectives from the point...