A customer experience audit, also known as a CX audit, is when you essentially bring everyone together to ask “how are we doing as a business?” – with an aim to identify challenges and opportunities that will ultimately help you to innovate and improve your end-to-end customer journey.
High time to run a CX Audit? Our Editor, Megan Jones, spoke to Alex Mead, Brad Cleveland, and Katie Stabler to create this handy guide to get you started.
What Is a Customer Experience Audit?
A CX audit is an in-depth review of everything your customers experience across your business – from your products, services, and processes to word of mouth and their expectations. It’s about how they feel about your business before, during, and after working with you.
By looking at these elements as part of a collaborative, cross-departmental process, you can answer the key questions of “how are we doing?” and “where could we improve?”
This approach is also vital to creating and maintaining a well-designed CX strategy that pays dividends, as Katie Stabler explains:
“When customers have a good experience with a business, they are more likely to return for future purchases and recommend the business to others.
Studies have shown that businesses with a strong CX strategy can see a significant increase in customer lifetime value.
CX can also be a major differentiator. If a business can provide a superior customer experience, it can stand out from the competition and attract new customers.”
Who Should Be Involved in a CX Audit?
A CX audit goes beyond the contact centre to HR, marketing, finance, and more, so be sure to gather representation from every part of the business.
“It’s not just about capturing the eyes and ears of the contact centre.
If you really want to dig deep into your end-to-end customer journey, you need representation from every corner of the business, as everyone has a stake in delivering a great experience.” – Brad Cleveland
It’s all about capturing data from different departments and bringing it together.
“The very best chief customer officers bring data together from everywhere! Unfortunately, getting buy-in to this approach is one of the toughest parts of the job, but you really need to bring that cross-department data together into a single view.
One way to achieve this is to nurture a customer-centric mindset, so everyone sees the benefit and proactively engages with feeding this data into a central place.” – Alex Mead
How Much Time Should I Set Aside for a CX Audit?
How much time you invest in your CX audit will vary depending on what your needs are.
For example, it is possible to capture a broad view of what the critical opportunities and challenges are across the business from a single morning of meetings with your key stakeholders. By contrast, a thorough audit can amount to several weeks of analysis.
Note, if you are taking on a new leadership role, you may be more inclined to do a thorough audit up front and then revisit key points with a lighter approach or ‘mini audit’ later in the year. It’s all about creating and maintaining momentum.
7 Ways to Capture Insights for Your Next CX Audit
So how do you start capturing the insights you need to better understand the opportunities and challenges across the business?
Here are some exercises to try:
1. Ask Your Agents What Customers Are Talking to Them About All Day
Always start a CX audit by asking “what do customers contact us about?” Whether you use analytics or post-call wrap-up codes, it’s important to understand if 5,000 calls are about quality of service or late deliveries.
Your frontline teams in the contact centre are also an incredible source of insight.
“No one knows your customers like your agents do, because they are talking to them all the time, so ask them and you’ll very quickly hear whether your billing process is confusing or where self-service options are frustrating customers.” – Brad Cleveland
If you are looking for advice on how to tap into feedback from your frontline agents, read our article: Want Your Frontline Staff to Share More Customer Feedback? Try This!
2. Audit Each Customer Lifecycle Stage
Next, you should drill down into where and why your customers are experiencing issues in their journey.
“You must audit each customer lifecycle stage to understand what’s happening and when. For example, you could investigate how many people called into the contact centre after receiving a bill, an email from marketing, or a new product. Speech analytics can really help to capture this insight in real time!” – Alex Mead
It’s about looking at your data around customer effort too! Have they sat in a queue for 20 minutes? Have you forced them to use a chatbot when they tried to phone you? Are you asking them to repeat the authentication process – even after they’ve already done it via an app?
All these things could be making the experience more painful for your customers, so it’s important to understand and address them.
For information on the key elements of a customer experience lifecycle and how you can improve it, read our article: The Key Elements of a CX Lifecycle and Ways to Improve It
3. Ask Yourself Why Customers AREN’T Completing Their Orders
It’s equally critical to look at the number of people who start a process to either ask a question or place an order and then give up.
“NPS rarely asks for feedback from customers who didn’t transact with your brand, so you’ve got to dig a bit deeper to see what you can glean about the service or product they were looking to buy and then didn’t.
Quite simply, if you can see 10,000 people started a sales journey with you and only 1,000 ended up buying, you have to ask the question “why did those 9,000 not complete their purchase with us?”
This isn’t the easiest insight to track, but you can begin to pull this data together by looking at how many people went to your website and left and what your call abandon rates are like on your sales lines, as well as customers who ordered from you and then returned the product, or didn’t continue with the service after a trial subscription.” – Alex Mead
4. Take a Closer Look at What Your Competitors Are Offering
Don’t just look at what you’re doing! Look at what your competitors are doing too!
Invest time in understanding how your suite of products and services compares and where you might be losing business – either through better product offerings or price points – to start a conversation about how you might be able to improve.
5. Understand When and Why Customer Loyalty Is Waning
Another key element of any customer experience audit is to track customer loyalty and retention, looking at drop-offs on a case-by-case basis to build a better picture of how effective your customer retention strategy is.
“If you are an airline with loyal customers who book a holiday with you every year, and then the fourth year in a row you notice someone doesn’t make a booking, find out what happened!
It will take some time and investigative work, but you could look on social media or even make a phone call to that customer to see if they still had a holiday that year and why they didn’t book with you.” – Alex Mead
You can also take a broader look at your customer retention by looking into whether or not they engaged with a special offer you sent them and how many times a customer has had to contact you about an issue.
For advice on the steps you need to take to better understand every customer, read our article: 3 Steps to Better Understanding Your Customers
6. Ask Your Agents Where Tech Is Letting the Customer Experience Down
Look internally too on where agents feel your technology and processes are holding them back from delivering an amazing customer experience.
Here are some questions to prompt an honest, insightful conversation with your agents:
- Are there any parts of our systems and processes which are making it harder to do your job?
- Is there anywhere where you feel technology or new processes could help make life easier?
- How do you think we can communicate and collaborate better across the wider business?
7. Ask Your Customers What They Think of Your Products and Services
Don’t forget to ask your customers for their feedback too, as this can help to capture any pain points and service issues in their own words.
Not only this, but when customers feel strongly enough to give praise or complain about your products and services, it’s a good indicator of what should be prioritized to fix or celebrate across the business.
There are lots of methods for capturing customer feedback too, with email surveys, voice of employees, and traditional surveys being the most popular – as highlighted in the latest What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now Survey research:
Set Strategic Priorities to Drive Real CX Improvements
The most exciting part of all? This is just the start! When you’ve captured this insight in your CX audit, it’s your chance as a leader to come into your own, taking the time to review the findings, set strategic priorities, and make changes to drive improvements across the end-to-end customer journey.
What Do You Include in Your CX Audits?
Join our LinkedIn community and share your thoughts.
With thanks to the following people for sharing their thoughts and experiences for this article:
- Alex Mead, Global Customer Experience Director
- Brad Cleveland, a well-respected consultant, keynote speaker, and course instructor
- Katie Stabler, CULTIVATE Customer Experience by Design
If you want more information on conducting audits in your contact centre to improve your CX, read these articles next:
- Building a Customer Experience Audit
- How to Conduct a Skills Audit and Coaching Plan
- Top Tips to Monitor Customer Service
Author: Megan Jones
Reviewed by: Xander Freeman
Published On: 3rd Dec 2024
Read more about - Customer Service Strategy, Alex Mead, Brad Cleveland, Customer Service, CX, Feedback, Katie Stabler, Top Story
