Market research is any organised effort to gather information about markets or customers. It is a very important component of business strategy. The term is often interchanged with marketing research; however, expert practitioners may wish to draw a distinction, in that marketing research is concerned specifically about marketing processes, while market research is concerned specifically with markets.

Market research is a key factor to get advantage over competitors. Market research provides important information to identify and analyse the market need, market size and competition.

Market research, which includes social and opinion research, is the systematic gathering and interpretation of information about individuals or organizations using statistical and analytical methods and techniques of the applied social sciences to gain insight or support decision making. When a client company hires a company providing mystery shopping services, a survey model will be drawn up and agreed to which defines what information and improvement factors the client company wishes to measure. These are then drawn up into survey instruments and assignments that are allocated to shoppers registered with the mystery shopping company.

The details and information points shoppers take note of typically include:

• number of employees in the premises on entering
• how long it takes before the mystery shopper is greeted
• the name of the employees
• whether or not the greeting is friendly, ideally according to objective measures
• the questions asked by the shopper to find a suitable product
• the types of products shown
• the sales arguments used by the employee
• whether or how the employee attempted to close the sale
• whether the employee suggested any add-on sales
• whether the employee invited the shopper to come back to the outlet
• cleanliness of premises and assistants
• speed of service
• compliance with company standards relating to service, branch appearance, and grooming/presentation​

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Our Mystery Shoppers are given instructions or procedures to make the transaction atypical to make the test of the knowledge and service skills of the employees more stringent or specific to a particular service issue (known as scenarios). For instance, mystery shoppers at a restaurant may pretend they are diabetic, or a clothing store mystery shopper could enquire about gift-wrapping services. Not all mystery shopping scenarios include a purchase. Indeed, many of those carried out by Digital Solutions investigate the effectiveness and transparency of sales of investment products from the Financial sector.

While gathering information, shoppers usually blend in to the store being evaluated as regular shoppers. They may sometimes be required to take photographs or measurements, return purchases, or count the number of products, seats, people during the visit. A timer or a stopwatch may be required.

After the visit the shopper submits the data collected to us, then we review and analyze the information, completing quantitative or qualitative statistical analysis reports on the data for the client company. This allows for a comparison of how the clients' business compares to others in the same market sector, and highlights strengths and weaknesses in their own organisation, drilling down to branch/shop level and ultimately employee level.

If you would like to discuss a market research strategy to help build a profile of the operation of your business, please call Digital Solutions to arrange a free, no commitment meeting to discuss the options available. 0774 095 0055