1. Mystery shopping

2. Mystery shopping: Mystery Shopping is a highly valuable performance tool that provides a clear, accurate and unbiased account of the interaction between your employees and your customers. It is a performance evaluation process that allows the owners and managers of service organisations to really understand how their customers are treated in their shops, offices or practices, on the telephone, in writing or online. It identifies the 'gap' between their service beliefs and the reality of the customer experience.

3. Process in mystery shopping:

4. Mystery shopper: Mystery shopper is one who is paid by the company to masquerade as a customer to discreetly measure the quality of services in their showrooms and front offices. Mystery auditors often throw up startling facts and reveal huge room for improvement. Mystery shoppers identify soft skills and intuitiveness as the key default areas among store staff in the country . Typically ,mystery auditors charge Rs.1500-2000 for a small size retail format store with fees going up for bigger showrooms. A mystery shopper spends 30-45 mins to review a small retail shop,it could take 2-3 days to review a hotel.

5. Conclusion: Almost all brands that have employed mystery shoppers swear by these secret audits and say they will make it a regular practice.”It really keeps the people on toes all the time.They never really know who could turn out to be the next mystery shopper..!