Application of consumer experience research to improve the business processes of retailers

“Mystery Shopping”, as well as other tools for researching consumer experience, have been developed in recent years with the help of the mass introduction of equipment for audio-video recording, as well as information systems and solutions for decoding and processing data and are actively used in the field of retail. In total, they themselves created an entire industry of business services, becoming an integral tool for retail management. Despite the evolution of trade itself, which experienced the rapid growth of retail outlets in the 2000s and went online, as well as the expansion of research tools, the use of their results - whether obtained by “secret” agents or automatically generated based on the results of the analysis of purchases made online - remains limited. And, as it seems to the authors, insufficient in terms of the potential they have. Having set themselves the goal of studying the current experience of using IPO (and, first of all, the “Mystery Shopper”) and assessing its scope of application, the authors propose an alternative, in-depth and systematic approach to working with the results of assessing consumer experience. For this purpose, at the beginning of October 2023, the authors conducted their own study of the practice of its use among a number of Russian retail companies, the results of which are presented in the article. The work draws a conclusion, based on the data they obtained, that retail trade and retail service enterprises (catering) are already striving to apply their results to modify their management processes and personnel development, but not to an sufficient extent in relation to other significant operational and auxiliary processes. The authors conclude by pointing out other areas of company work and processes where Mystery Shopping and other similar studies can be successfully applied as a source of objective data for continuous process improvement in the spirit of Total Quality Management (TQM) principles.