How to Conduct a Customer Experience Audit

Around 73% of consumers surveyed by PwC pointed to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Yet, less than half said companies are doing a good job of providing a top-notch customer experience.

Closing this gap can give your business a competitive edge.

If you want to improve your customer experience (CX), you’ll first need to measure it with a customer experience audit.

In this article, you’ll learn how to conduct a thorough audit. This will help you create a plan of action to improve your customer experience, encouraging them to buy from you (and keep coming back).

Customers want the best experience possible, and they don’t want to expend more effort searching for a better option. 

These are the two sides of the customer experience coin: on one hand, you have to do things that make customers happy. But it’s just as important to avoid the painful, high-friction experiences that come with CX functionality problems. 

But you can’t deliver that clean customer experience without first getting your hands dirty. That means taking a hard look at your customer touchpoints and what the data says about their performance in a customer experience audit (CX audit). 

It might not be easy, but a CX audit can yield benefits for your business, including:

Empowered with new insights about your customer experience, you’ll be able to identify new ways to delight your customers and repair any points of high friction. 

But before you can do that, you have to ask yourself a very basic question: how do you conduct an audit that yields insights this powerful?

To conduct a CX audit, you’ll first need to map out the customer’s journey for each customer segment (including existing customers). Once you’ve done that, you can get into the details and define where each type of customer encounters your brand.

To diagnose any issues and make a prognosis for treatment, you’ll need to gather data and analyze it according to customer motivations. Only then can you make your plan to address the issues.

I’ll show you how to do all of that below.

Here is a brief list of checkpoints you can use to begin a customer experience audit that highlights key areas for improvement.

Also known as the “customer lifecycle,” a customer journey map is the beginning-to-end tale of their experience with you.

In this step, you need to map out the various stages of the customer journey. Focus on high-level points, such as pre-sale points in the customer journey and post-sale points.

Pre-sale touchpoints are all about generating enthusiasm (e.g., social media and landing pages); post-sale touchpoints are about earning enthusiasm (e.g., thank-you and promotional emails). 

For example, for a student interested in a business course, the high-level journey might look like this:

Once you’ve defined the stages of your customer journey for each customer segment, both pre-and post-sale, you have your map in its broadest sense. Now you’re ready to start collecting the data. 

Once you have the overview of your customer journey, it’s time to go granular with each touchpoint.

When it comes down to it, an audit of the customer experience is really an audit of a series of customer touchpoints. Those touchpoints are what determine and define a customer’s true digital experience with your business. Did you meet customer expectations, or are there key points of friction where you disappointed them?

Take the customer journeyroadmap you’ve defined in the previous section and track all of the touchpoints in which your customers interact with you along the way. 

Here are some common touchpoints to consider:

To make sure you’ve rounded up every touchpoint in your business, consider each stage of the buyer’s journey and map every point they might come into contact with your business. If you’re not sure, you can always ask some of your customers what steps they took to find you in a survey or series of interviews. I’ll talk more about that in a moment.

Once you’ve added these touchpoints to your customer journey roadmap, collect all the data you have on each stage and touchpoint.

Look for areas of high friction. For example, look at where your website viewers are bouncing off the page, where your email list is unsubscribing, and where your shoppers are abandoning their carts. I’ll discuss friction further in step four.

Often, the challenge here won’t be finding data. It will be making sense of the mountains of data available to you.

To avoid overwhelm, take a “one at a time” approach. For example, you might do one review of your data platforms at a time. A Google Analytics review is a good place to start. If you run another platform, such as Clickstream, check that out next. 

Or, you might choose to look at each touchpoint individually, putting in plans to optimize each as you go.

For each touchpoint in each stage in the customer journey, ask yourself the following questions:

Diagnosing your poor-performing customer touchpoints sounds easy. But without a frame of reference, it might feel like you have a haystack of data and you’re looking for a needle of insight.

Use the AIDA + post-sale funnel to inform your diagnosis of poor customer experiences. Here’s what AIDA means:

Through this lens, you should be able to sort your data and organize it effectively, gauging where in the funnel you’re going wrong. 

At some point, you’re losing opportunities to delight or avoid disappointment with your customers. Determine the motivation behind the issue (whether it’s an “attention” problem or a “desire” problem) to inform your response and improve the experience.

Consider conducting customer interviews to identify basic problems. Customers might not always tell you how to improve something, but they can certainly tell you what to improve.

Gather a large enough sample size of customer feedback until you can pinpoint patterns in what they tell you. Review client feedback, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and customer satisfaction surveys. 

Quantitative insights can be helpful, but the full gamut of qualitative customer responses will put your finger on the pulse of the customer experience.

Keep in mind that each tool has its specific strengths, as well.

Diagnosis is half the battle. Once you know what to fix, improving the customer experience can be as simple as a quick edit in your content management system (such as removing a form field in your newsletter sign-up process). Or, for larger changes to embedded systems, it can mean hours of meetings between departments. 

So, how do you prioritize your next steps?

Build a roadmap based on the problems you’ve diagnosed. Create benchmarks and goals for improving friction on each of the specific touchpoints you identified and plot your timeline to address them. 

These benchmarks and timelines are unique to each business. Small issues for smaller companies may be resolved quickly. For larger companies with many departments to coordinate, or larger issues, more time may be needed.

Regardless, it’s a good idea to plot the issues and timelines on a roadmap so you don’t loose track.

For example, here are some of the most common friction points and how impactful they can be on your CX:

Finally, make customer experience management (such as your CX audit) a routine part of your marketing strategy. You never know when a new issue might pop up. The more quickly you fix it, the smoother your customer experience will be across all demographics.

Of all the customer-centric initiatives you launch to improve your digital experience, a CX audit is the most foundational. 

Your customer experience audit will identify “kinks in the hose” that restore the flow of conversions to your business. Most importantly, it will help you identify the hidden problems you didn’t know were plaguing your business. 

Once you’ve mapped out the entire user experience, found key points of weakness, and actioned your improvements, your customers are more likely to thank you with purchases, loyalty, and advocacy.