Rise of Mystery Shopping in Pakistan: What Brands are Learning

November 19, 2025

Introduction

Mystery shopping has shifted from a niche evaluation tactic to a central performance tool in Pakistan’s business landscape. As local and international brands face sharper competition and rising customer expectations, they are turning to mystery shopping to understand their service gaps in real time. The practice has grown steadily across retail, banking, food service, telecommunications, and even healthcare. This rise is tied to a noticeable change in how Pakistani consumers behave. They compare experiences, share opinions freely, and reward brands that deliver consistency. Companies that used to rely on internal impressions now seek the neutral, ground level insights that mystery shoppers provide.

This article examines why mystery shopping has accelerated in Pakistan, what brands are learning from it, and how firms like ACE Research are helping businesses translate findings into tangible improvements.

A Shift in Consumer Power

The modern Pakistani consumer carries a powerful tool in their pocket. Social platforms and online marketplaces have made customer opinions highly visible. When a single negative experience can reach thousands of potential customers, businesses have become far more attentive to service quality. Mystery shopping offers a structured way to evaluate what customers experience before the public does. Brands use it to catch flaws early, reinforce what is working well, and benchmark their service levels against competitors.

In many cases, companies believed they understood their customers until they saw objective reports from mystery shoppers. These reports often show that service delivery varies across branches, staff members, or times of day. The growing emphasis on customer centered strategies has made these findings more valuable than ever.

Expanding Across Industries

The earliest adopters of mystery shopping in Pakistan were mostly multinationals including fashion retailers and food chains. Banks, oil marketing companies and FMCGs also conduct regular mystery shopping. Today the practice spans a much wider range of sectors.

Banks use it to measure teller interactions, complaint handling, and cross selling behavior. Telecom operators rely on it to evaluate franchise performance and frontline knowledge. Hospitals and diagnostic centers employ mystery patients to ensure compliance with service protocols and hygiene standards. Supermarkets want to assess checkout efficiency, stocking accuracy, and customer guidance. Even government facilitated service centers now monitor user experience through third party audits.

This expansion reflects a broader recognition that service quality is no longer optional. Every industry that interacts directly with the public needs visibility into what actually happens at the customer interface.

What Brands Are Learning

Brands in Pakistan are discovering that customers notice small details. They value focused staff, short waiting times, transparent information, and consistent processes. Mystery shopping has highlighted several patterns.

First, consumers judge the entire journey from greeting to departure. Companies that pay attention to only one stage of the customer experience miss significant weaknesses. Second, customers expect the same quality across all branches. A strong experience in one location followed by a weak experience in another can damage overall trust. Third, training and product knowledge are often uneven. Many frontline employees perform well when supervised, yet struggle under pressure or when asked about technical details. Mystery shopping exposes these inconsistencies in a way that internal evaluations rarely do.

Most importantly, brands are learning how service issues impact revenue. A slow counter, a poorly explained promotion, or an unhelpful employee can directly reduce conversions. Businesses that once treated customer service as a soft metric now use mystery shopping data to make financial decisions.

Local Factors Driving Growth

A few Pakistan specific trends have accelerated the adoption of mystery shopping. Urbanization has concentrated large segments of the population in Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, and Faisalabad, increasing competition among brands. Greater exposure to international standards has raised expectations for quality and convenience. Rising disposable income in middle class households has shifted attention toward experience and not just price.

At the same time, the retail environment has changed. Mall culture, franchise expansion, and digital integration have made consistency more challenging. Branch managers can no longer rely only on personal supervision. Companies need structured, repeatable assessments that present an accurate picture of daily operations. Mystery shopping fills that role effectively.

The Role of Data and Technology

Modern mystery shopping is far more sophisticated than the older practice of basic in store observation. Mobile reporting, time stamped photos, geotagging, and standardized scoring systems ensure that results are credible and comparable. Brands review dashboards that show trends across cities, branches, and service categories. Decision makers no longer wait for quarterly audits. They make adjustments within days based on real time findings.

Technology has also reduced biases. Mystery shoppers follow predefined evaluation paths that align with brand objectives. The result is feedback that is specific, measurable, and directly actionable.

Turning Insights into Action

Collecting data is only the first step. The true value of mystery shopping lies in how brands interpret and apply the findings. Leading companies use these insights to redesign training programs, optimize store layouts, and refine sales strategies. Some businesses even link performance bonuses to mystery shopping results to encourage consistent behavior.

One common improvement area is communication. Employees often need clearer guidance on how to approach customers, explain offers, or respond to complaints. Mystery shopping highlights these gaps in real scenarios. Brands then restructure scripts, role play exercises, or incentive structures to correct them.

Another major area is compliance. Whether it involves safety procedures in restaurants or documentation requirements in banks, mystery shopping helps ensure that policies are followed. This protects both the customer and the brand.

How ACE Research Supports This Transformation

ACE Research has been a key partner for many Pakistani brands seeking to improve their service quality. The company combines experienced field teams with structured methodologies to deliver reliable evaluations. Its mystery shopping programs go beyond scoring forms and provide narrative insights that help clients understand the context behind each observation.

The organization tailors its mystery shopping designs to match the service flows of each sector. Whether the objective is to test product knowledge, response times, hygiene standards, sales behavior, or customer handling, ACE Research builds evaluations that reflect actual customer journeys. Brands benefit not only from accurate data but from practical recommendations that support long term improvement.

Future Outlook

Mystery shopping in Pakistan is likely to continue its upward trajectory. The rise of online shopping, hybrid service models, and integrated sales channels will push companies to evaluate both physical and digital touchpoints. Mystery shoppers may increasingly be asked to assess app usability, delivery performance, and chat support effectiveness alongside traditional in store visits.

Customer loyalty is becoming harder to earn. Brands that commit to regular mystery shopping will be better positioned to maintain service quality and adapt quickly to changing expectations.

Conclusion

Mystery shopping has become an essential tool for Pakistani businesses seeking to strengthen customer experience and protect their reputation. As the market grows more competitive and consumers grow more discerning, companies that rely on clear, unbiased insights will outperform those that rely on assumptions. The rise of mystery shopping reflects a broader shift toward evidence based decision making. With skilled partners like ACE Research supporting this evolution, brands can move from reactive problem solving to a proactive culture of continuous improvement.

 

Data

How to Ensure Proper Data Cleaning in Excel?

May 11, 2020

In Research, the emphasis is on the report writing because a good report comprehensively explains all the stages with the relevant outcome and valuable way forwards.

Reports are the product of data gathered either from secondary or primary sources and it is, therefore, very important for the data to be authentic, reliable, and up to date. In order to ensure the reliability of data, it has to be processed for omitting any error or mistake. And before we can work with our data, we need to make sure it’s valid, accurate, and reliable.

In the age of Big Data, companies may spend just as much or more on maintaining the health and cleaning their data as they spend on collecting it in the first place. Consider the issues that can stem from missing or wrong values, duplicates, and typos. The validity, accuracy, and reliability of your calculations depend on your ability to keep your data up-to-date, this is also evident from Ace Research’s projects.

To prepare data for later analysis, it is important to have a clean data table.  Depending on the origin of the data, you may need to do some of the following steps to ensure that the data are as complete and consistent as possible.

  1. Assign unique code to your fields

Unique codes are very useful while sorting and cleaning data because at any stage if trouble arises you can sort out the data from your database with the help of unique codes already assigned to the data set.

  1. Maintain separate sheets if you are working on a huge data set

Often the data is very large and you cannot work on the whole data set at the same time, so it is preferred to maintain separate files for each change you make. This helps when you refer back in case you missed anything at any step.

  1. Get rid of extra spaces

Extra spaces are painfully difficult to spot. While you may somehow spot the extra spaces between words or numbers, trailing spaces are not even visible. Here is a neat way to get rid of these extra spaces

Excel TRIM function takes the cell reference (or text) as the input. It removes leading and trailing spaces as well as the additional spaces between words (except single spaces).

  1. Select and treat all blank cells

Blank cells can create havoc if not treated beforehand. We often face issues with blank cells in a data set that is used to create reports.

You may want to fill all blank cells with ‘0’ or ‘Not Available’, or may simply want to highlight it. If there is a huge data set, doing this manually could take hours. Thankfully, there is a way you can select all the blank cells at once.

  1. Select the entire data set
  2. Press F5 (this opens the Go to dialogue box)
  3. Click on the Special button (at the bottom left).
  4. This opens the Go To Special dialogue box
  5. Select Blank and Click OK

This selects all the blank cells in your data set. If you want to enter 0 or Not Available in all these cells, just type it and press Control + Enter (remember if you press only enter, the value is inserted only in the active cell).

  1. Remove duplicates

There can be 2 things you can do with duplicate data – Highlight It or Delete It.

Highlight Duplicate Data:

Select the data and Go to Home – Conditional Formatting – Highlight Cells Rules – Duplicate Values.

Specify the formatting and all the duplicate values get highlighted.

Delete Duplicates in Data: 

  • Select the data and Go to Data – Remove Duplicates.
  • If your data has headers, ensure that the checkbox at the top right is checked.
  • Select the Column(s) from which you want to remove duplicates and click OK.

This removes duplicate values from the list.

If you want the original list intact, copy-paste the data at some other location and then do this.

  1. Highlight errors

There are 2 ways you can highlight Errors in Data in Excel:

Using Conditional Formatting

  • Select the entire data set
  • Go to Home –Conditional Formatting – New Rule
  • In New Formatting Rule Dialogue Box select ‘Format Only Cells that Contain’
  • In the Rule Description, select Errors from the drop-down
  • Set the format and click OK. This highlights any error value in the selected dataset

Using Go To Special

  • Select the entire data set
  • Press F5 (this opens the Go To Dialogue box)
  • Click on Special Button at the bottom left
  • Select Formulas and uncheck all options except Errors

This selects all the cells that have an error in it. Now you can manually highlight these, delete it, or type anything into it.

  1. Change text to lower/upper/proper case

When you import data from text files, often the names or titles are not consistent. Sometimes all the text could be in lower/upper case or it could be a mix of both. You can easily make it all consistent by using these three functions:

  • LOWER () – Converts all text into Lower Case.
  • UPPER () – Converts all text into Upper Case.
  • PROPER () – Converts all Text into Proper Case.
  1. Parse data using text to column

When you get data from a database or import it from a text file, it may happen that all the text is cramped in one cell. You can parse this text into multiple cells by using Text to Column functionality in Excel.

  • Select the data/text you want to parse
  • Go To Data –Text to Column (This opens the Text to Columns Wizard)

Step 1: Select the data type (select Delimited if your data is not equally spaced, and is separated by characters such as comma, a hyphen, dot.). Click Next

Step 2: Select Delimiter (the character that separates your data). You can select pre-defined delimiter or anything else using the other option

Step 3: Select the data format. Also, select the destination cell. If the destination cell is not selected, the current cell is overwritten.

  1. Spell check

Nothing lowers the credibility of your work than a spelling mistake.

Use the keyboard shortcut F7 to run a spell check for your data set in Excel.

  1. Delete all formatting

In my job, I used multiple databases to get the data in excel. Every database had its own data formatting. When you have all the data in place, here is how you can delete all the formatting at one go:

  • Select the data set
  • Go to Home – Clear –Clear Formats

Similarly, you can also clear only the comments, hyperlinks, or content.

  1. Use find and replace to clean data in excel

Find and replace is indispensable when it comes to data cleansing. For example, you can select and remove all zeros, change references in formulas, find and change formatting, and so on.