Let’s play a game of pretend.
You enter a coffee shop. The image out front is beautiful, but the menu is confusing, the barista behind the counter doesn’t know if they have oat milk, and the card reader “hasn’t worked since Tuesday.”
You still buy the coffee, but you’re already formulating a one-star review in your head.
Now, pretend that the coffee shop is your company. That the “counter” is your website, onboarding flow, checkout, or support inbox. That “this hasn’t worked since Tuesday” is your churn rate, cart abandonment, complaints, or tickets.
Most companies have a disconnect between their perception of the customer experience (Cep) and the actual customer experience (Acp).
That’s where a Customer Experience Audit comes in handy.
An audit shouldn’t be a 50-page document for the dusty shelf of your CEO’s office. It should be a reality check to expose the pain points and explain the gaps in your customer journey.
In this guide, we’ll go over the top 5 aspects to include in your Customer Experience Audit and how they can help you improve your customer experience.
Evaluate Your Digital Front Door
Your website is often the first impression of your company, but it’s frequently neglected when it comes to the customer experience. Try navigating your website or web app as if you were a confused first-time visitor. Ask yourself questions like:
- Can I easily find pricing or any information about your product/service within 10 seconds?
- Does the website load quickly on mobile devices?
- Are the navigation and page organization intuitive?
- Are all the CTAs clear and easy to find?
- Can customers easily contact or support you?
- Are all forms easy to complete and necessary?
These questions might point to a few friction points for first-time customers.
Remember, a slow-loading, unorganized, or difficult-to-use website is the barrier between your amazing product/service and the customers who need to know about it.
If your website is hurting your sales, lead generation, or support, you may want to consider a web design improvement or website redesign.
After all, customer-centric companies need to be able to effectively research, compare, and contact businesses through their online presence.
Identify Friction Points in Your Customer Handoffs
Imagine you’re participating in a relay race.
The Marketing team passes the baton to Sales, who passes it to Onboarding, who passes it to Support.
There’s a disconnect at some point. Maybe the baton fell out in the exchange and nobody noticed. That’s akin to the Black Hole Handoff.
An example of a black hole handoff might be a customer submitting a demo request and not hearing back from anyone for a few days, while the sales team received an automatically generated thank-you email. Or, a customer has a conversation with a chatbot and then is passed off to an agent, who asks them to explain the situation again.
Some things to analyze during your audit are:
- Lead-to-sales handoffs
- Sales-to-onboarding processes
- Customer support escalations
- CRM data transfers
- Automated notifications
- Internal communication
- Response times
Customer journey mapping can help you see exactly which handoffs are causing customer pain or confusion.
This is also where customer support can come into play. Not everyone’s happy with the support they receive, which could be due to a disorganized or poorly timed handoff.
Smart customer journey automation can help you streamline these processes so your customers can have a seamless experience.
Perform a Personalization Reality Check
Automation is great, but bad automation is a robot wearing a name tag.
There’s a big difference between “Hi {{First_Name}}!” in your subject line and intelligent personalization that goes beyond a {{First_Name}} placeholder. A good thing to look at during your audit is your personalization or segmentation strategy.
Take a look at your:
- Email campaigns
- SMS campaigns
- Retargeting ads
- Onboarding flows
- Product recommendations
- Promotional offers
Can you identify the difference between a customer who’s already purchased a premium subscription and someone who hasn’t? Would your marketing automation know the difference?
If your website’s recommendation engine sends a customer a “premium upgrade” email the day after they’ve purchased the same subscription, your marketing automation is probably doing more harm than good.
Good personalization should be able to anticipate the intent of the customer and provide helpful suggestions.
The focus isn’t on “how much are we talking to the customer?” It’s on “how relevant is the conversation?”
Establish a Strong Feedback Loop
Many companies rely on metrics like NPS, satisfaction scores, and star ratings to determine what customers are saying about their brand.
While useful, these aren’t always clear indicators of what to change, only that something is right or wrong.
As a Customer Experience Audit, you want to dig deeper and analyze not only quantitative data but qualitative comments and suggestions. That’s where customer experience analytics come in.
You can dig into your:
- Reviews
- Surveys
- Support conversations
- Conversion funnels
- And more
to identify common pain points or themes.
Read Negative Reviews
Look beyond the 1-star reviews and see if there are common complaints that customers are voicing. Read the comments and the complaints to see what they’re saying. Are customers complaining about response times, the clarity of instructions, billing issues, or communication problems?
Analyze Conversations
Review your customer support conversations. Are there any common questions that your customers are asking? This can point to a disconnect between your website content and the information your customers are seeking. It can also inform you what support conversations to prioritize.
Talk to Frontline Employees
Your frontline employees often know where the real pain points are.
Ask them, “What are the biggest problems that you have to apologize for?” That’s probably an area of improvement for your customer journey.
Audit the Internal Customer Experience
Customer experience and employee experience are deeply connected.
You can’t have one without the other. In many ways, the internal customer experience can shape the external customer experience. If your employees have an inefficient, confusing, or frustrating internal workflow, it can affect their ability to help customers.
Imagine an employee has to go through 5 disjointed systems to find one piece of information, or worse, has to call another employee to get that information for them.
What does the end customer see? Slow response times, confusion, unanswered questions, errors, and miscommunication.
Some things to look at in your internal audit are:
- Tools
- Processes
- Employee training
- Communication
- CRM and automation
The more streamlined and efficient your internal processes are, the more consistent and efficient your customer processes will be.
How to Conduct a Customer Experience Audit
If you’re wondering how to conduct a customer experience audit, don’t feel the need to do everything at once. That’s a surefire way to burnout before you begin.
Start with a journey map of one of your key customer journeys. Here’s how to start:
Step 1: Choose a Customer Journey
Pick a valuable customer journey, such as a new customer signing up, onboarding, and making their first purchase. Perform a customer journey mapping exercise to document the journey and identify points of friction.
Step 2: Walk Through the Journey Yourself
Walk through the journey one step at a time and note any friction points.
Check out everything:
- Your pages
- Forms
- Emails
- SMS
- Notifications
- Buttons
- Confirmations
- Interactions
Look around for things that didn’t make sense, were slow, repetitive, or redundant. Ask yourself how to identify customer friction points at each stage. Look for extra clicks, confusing language, repetitive questions, delays, and inconsistent information.
This will help you understand how to analyze the customer journey from the eyes of your customers, not just your employees.
Step 3: Prioritize Quick Fixes
When you find them, don’t immediately plan out a six-month technology overhaul. Prioritize quick fixes that will make a noticeable difference in the customer’s journey.
For example, if you find that customers are struggling to understand certain links, make the text more descriptive. When you see unnecessary steps in the journey, cut them out. If there are delayed or irrelevant notifications, revise them. If there’s redundant or incorrect information, edit it.
You can achieve customer experience improvements without a major overhaul of your business.
Customer Experience Audit Checklist
Use this Customer Experience Audit checklist to review what you need to look at in your audit.
| Audit Area | What To Check |
| Website & App | Speed, navigation, mobile experience, CTAs |
| Customer Journey | Number of steps, friction points, drop-offs |
| Handoffs | Marketing, sales, onboarding, support transitions |
| Personalization | Relevance of emails, SMS, and recommendations |
| Feedback | Reviews, surveys, support tickets, complaints |
| Support | Response time, resolution time, repeated questions |
| Internal Systems | CRM, automation, integrations, employee workflows |
| Communication | Consistency, clarity, timing, tone |
The audit checklist should not just be about problems. It should help your team understand what issues are pressing and what can wait.
Improving the Customer Experience After an Audit
Knowing where you have problems is one thing. Improving them is another. You can use this customer experience improvement guide to help you prioritize your improvements.
Improvements should be prioritized by how much of an impact they’ll make.
For example, a broken checkout button has a much bigger impact than a minor wording adjustment on a little-known page.
You can also evaluate the impact by comparing customer feedback with conversion rate data. If your customers are having problems at a certain stage of the journey, revealed through the audit, and analytics show a drop-off at that stage, that’s a good indicator of friction.
After addressing these improvements, the right customer experience changes will improve satisfaction, retention, loyalty, and repeat purchases.
The aim isn’t to fix everything at once. It’s to consistently reduce the friction that affects your customers’ journey.
Final Thoughts
A Customer Experience Audit isn’t about finding people to blame. It’s about finding where customers are struggling and reducing the friction in their journey.
By improving their ability to find information, get help, make a purchase, or do business with you, you can give them an experience that gets them to return, refer, and purchase again and again.
Every business has friction points. The goal is to find them before they become a bigger problem.
If you want to provide more personalized, seamless, and customer-centric experiences, contact the experts at Reach Skyline to discuss how strategic improvements to the customer journey can benefit your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is a Customer Experience Audit?
A Customer Experience Audit is a process of reviewing the different touchpoints customers have with your business, such as websites, communication, sales, onboarding, support, automation, and internal processes. An audit aims to identify pain points and improvement opportunities for a better customer experience.
2. Why is a Customer Experience Audit important?
A Customer Experience Audit can help businesses identify the reasons customers may be struggling, abandoning carts, complaining, or not returning. It can provide a reality check and actionable insights that can lead to improved customer satisfaction and business outcomes.
3. How often should a business perform a CX audit?
Companies should aim to conduct a comprehensive CX audit at least once a year. Audits should also be performed after significant changes, such as a new website, product, service, CRM, or any other major shift in the customer journey.
4. What should be included in a CX audit?
A CX audit should be tailored to the needs of the business, but some common areas to review are the website, customer journey, handoffs between teams, personalization, customer feedback, support, internal systems, automation, and communication.
5. How can businesses improve customer experience after an audit?
Improving the customer experience should be based on your findings and the impact they have on your business. You should prioritize issues that have the most significant effect on your customers and business operations. Some examples of improvements are simplifying the customer journey, improving response times, fixing internal processes, and streamlining communication.