Customer experience audits

Customer experience audits let you understand the experience you're offering your customers at each step of their journey with you. Is it engaging? Is it relevant? Is it simple? Is it properly connected to other channels? In all, does it encourage your customers to stay with you, or switch to a competitor?

CX audits can also:

• Give you a comparison against competitors' customer experiences.
• Establish performance indicators for customer experience performance and show how those indicators affect business KPIs.
• Allow you to chart improvement over time, to motivate your organisation and prove the impact of your work.

Flow has conducted multi-channel CX audits on retail stores, call centres, websites and WAP services. The level of insight gained, and the ideas generated, offer our clients real competitive advantage.

How it works

Flow works with you to understand:

• Your business: An outline of your current business model and the performance indicators that you would expect customer experience to impact upon.
• Your customer lifecycle: The stages your customers go through and the key tasks they perform at each stage.
• Areas of focus: Auditing the whole of a large customer experience at once can prove overwhelming. It's often important to focus the research on a particular channel, lifecycle stage or KPI.
• Competitors: Identifying the competitors you want to benchmark against during the audit, if required.
• The type of audit required: Customer experience audits typically make use of a mixture of expert evaluation and customer observation. We adjust the mix to match your needs.

From there, we can begin the research. Expert evaluation involves getting one or more of our customer experience consultants to be a mystery shopper and participate in the customer experience first hand. It's a cost-effective technique and practical for competitor benchmarking.

Observation techniques involve watching users as they try to complete key steps in the customer experience. This can include diary studies or accompanied web surfing. It's also possible to observe customer interaction in a call centre or retail environment.

The final ingredient is the staff perspective. Flow runs interviews and workshops with key stakeholders and representative members of staff to understand their perspectives, attitudes and ideas.

Results

Each touchpoint that we audit is scored against our customer experience benchmark criteria. This gives a hard number for comparison over time or between competitors.

Beyond the numbers, though, there are plenty of insights:

• Examples of good and bad customer experiences.
• Competitor information: Insights into your competitors' customer experience and how you measure up.
• Impact on KPIs: Evidence of how customer experience issues impact your key business performance indicators.
• Experience maps showing the reality of your customer experience, areas where fractures occur, and opportunities for competitive advantage.
• Recommendations and designs for how to improve each touchpoint.
• Strategic recommendations for how to roll out and improve customer experience overall.

The final deliverable is typically in the form of a report, with executive summary and charts, and a presentation. Workshops can be very useful, so that the team can get together and agree on next steps.

Flow's customer experience maps make it easier to communicate and understand the big picture. The map allows you to think holistically about your service and understand where the opportunities lie across the different service channels. From there, you can build a strategy for change.