The Value of Conducting a Customer Experience Audit

Happy and happy clients who will stick to you in the long term are the ultimate goal, right? This necessitates the optimal customer experience!

Today, customer experience (CX) is a critical component that firms consider when developing their strategy in a competitive market. As a result, a customer-centric organization’s primary objective is to exceed its customers’ expectations in order to keep them as long-term potential clients, ensuring a growth in business income. Moreover, a satisfied customer not only generates income but also advertises the business through channels such as word of mouth and the internet. This customer-centric culture and experience necessitate a well-thought-out approach as well as ongoing modifications and enhancements. And doing a CX audit is a big component of maintaining this advantage over other competitors.

Also read: The Role of Conversational AI in Amplifying Customer Experience

The audit itself is an extensive assessment of the interactions between your consumers and your brand. All the essential contact points during the shopping trip of your clients include search, brand selection, product/service buying and interactions after purchase. As customers may make repeat purchases, it’s crucial to keep track of their previous transactions.

Customer Experience Audit’s Components

CMOs are spending 26% of their marketing budgets on technology, according to Gartner, and this trend is expected to continue. It is critical to monitor the efficacy of technology investments against your goals to avoid the risk of investments that do not pay off.

The customer experience audit is an ongoing activity in many organizations. In essence, the two key elements of it are CX management and CX performance. Companies can use these methods to build and provide tailored experiences that showcase their uniqueness and align the customer’s perception of company as well. To audit their customer experience, several factors are reviewed, including the strategy, consumer insights, governance and operating model, design, technology, and people/culture.

For conducting a robust CX Audit, it is essential to carry out research on the company and its audience. Customer personas, storyboards, path maps, and service blueprints are examples of effective tools for making research palatable and identifying key issues and possibilities. Further, the auditing team can use root cause analysis to better describe the “problem to solve” for experience designers. Finally, to guarantee that the audits result in action, the audit should include some fast testing and piloting recommendations of experience improvements, as well as scope and business cases.

Also read: How AI & Data Science Impact the Banking Industry

Identify your key customers

A deeper look into a brand’s most essential consumers – their behaviors, attitudes, preferences, and demands – is at the heart of a CX audit. This can be accomplished by a combination of primary, secondary, and tertiary research, as well as heuristic and ethnographic observation and historical analysis of acquired business data points. Along with this, it is important to set long term business goals to align the needs of the customers and prospect with the services provided. It’s critical to develop use cases and day-to-day scenarios that show where a brand matters to a customer and vice versa.

It’s critical to ensure that all client touchpoints are thoroughly and holistically assessed to grasp the big picture and gain insights into areas where the experience is succeeding or failing. Employing data science methodologies helps to reveal insights into the end-to-end experience touchpoints, the expenses involved with delivering them, and the customer’s (actual or predicted) value to the business.

Major Challenges to conducting CX Audits are:

Underutilization of technology: Most businesses employ overly simplistic procedures, which results in erroneous findings and incomplete data. Companies must employ more advanced approaches such as A/B testing, multi-variable testing techniques, adaptive, real-time audience segmentation, and others. Using these strategies will result in much improved CX optimization.

Also read: Continuous Testing: A Holistic Approach to QA

Customer experience expectations: Customer behavior shifts from time to time, making it difficult for businesses to stay up in volatile marketplaces. To address this, businesses should not only create a customer experience blueprint, but also uncover new aspects that benefit clients and meet the brand’s sales objectives when trends change.

Macro visualization of data: Many marketers prefer KPIs with a larger scope such as engagement levels, content consumption, and lifetime value, over other key performance indicators, such as traffic levels, cost per click, and conversion rates. This prevents businesses from seeing the big picture and hinders progress.

Apexon provides an in-depth CX Audit powered by CXWatch & Adapty to assist you in defining your end goals and improving client journeys. You will receive:

1. Brief assessment of your CX maturity and its enablers
2. Guide you to align your organization around goals
3. Suggest moments that matter to your customers