A consultancy working on service quality, customer experience or network compliance for a retail client often hits the same obstacle: part of the store network is in Italy. Building your own field team there is slow and expensive, and the risk of uneven data from one city to the next is high. The usual answer is to hand the Italian fieldwork to a local partner while keeping the method and the client relationship in your hands. This article explains how that works with us, step by step.
Your client sees your brand, not ours
We work white label. Reports can be delivered through a version of our platform configured with your logo and reached through a dedicated address, so dashboards, reports and every piece of information acquired in the programme are attributed to your company. Your client only learns the name Mebius if you decide to tell them.
In practice, you remain your client's point of contact and we act as your field team in Italy. Scoping, recommendations and the final presentation stay your job; recruiting, briefing and managing shoppers, collecting and checking the data become ours.
Who resells mystery shopping
The model is not limited to research agencies. Among the companies that resell our mystery shopping to their own clients are:
- market research companies that want to add the method without building a shopper network;
- management and CX consultancies running service quality projects;
- recruitment and training companies, which use visits to measure the effect of their courses;
- quality certification and inspection bodies, which use independent checks as part of their audits.
Companies that supply services to retailers, such as leaflet distribution, hostess and promoter staffing or window dressing, can also use third-party checks to prove the quality of their own work to their clients.
From brief to fieldwork: the steps
- Brief and scope. You send us objectives, the list of stores, the cities and the timing. We come back with a proposed scope and a quote.
- Questionnaire. We adapt your existing evaluation form, or build it with you, taking into account how Italian retail actually works.
- Shopper selection and training. Shoppers are chosen to match the profile of the brand's real customers, then briefed on the visit scenario.
- Pilot visits. A few test visits validate the questionnaire and the scenario before full deployment.
- Fieldwork and validation. Every visit is checked before it enters the results.
- Reporting. Data arrives on the dashboard, with real-time updates and export, ready to go into your own deliverables.
For a standard mystery shopping programme, it takes seven working days from brief to first results. The full schedule depends on the number of stores, how spread out they are and the number of waves.
Raw data or finished report: you choose the split
Not every consultancy wants the same deliverable. Some prefer raw data to process with their own models and benchmarks; others want a finished report they can adapt. We also handle validation, proofreading and translation of the results, so the open comments written by Italian shoppers reach you in a form you can use. Where the line falls between our work and yours is agreed at the start of the project.
The guarantees your client will ask about
When results go to a board, the method has to be beyond question. Mebius sits on the board of MSPA Europe & Africa (Board Member, Elite Member and Vice President), is a member of ESOMAR and holds ISO 9001 certification from TÜV Italia. Personal data is processed under the GDPR as applied in Italy, under the supervision of the Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali — a topic we cover in GDPR-compliant market research in Italy.
Beyond mystery shopping
Depending on the project, the Italian fieldwork can also include in-store audits, mystery calls, focus groups in our Rome facility with remote observation and simultaneous interpretation, or the analysis of customer reviews. One partner for the whole Italian leg means one standard and one point of accountability — the trade-off we discuss in one local partner vs DIY.
Do you have a project with stores in Italy? Tell us about the stores, the cities and the timing, and we will come back with a scope and a proposal. Contact us or see our services for market research companies.
