Customer experience is everything. A consistent, frictionless experience reduces inbound calls, nurtures loyalty, and encourages repeat shopping. If you’re not sure whether you’re delivering on customer expectations – and if not, where you can improve – here’s how to conduct an audit that will help you pinpoint areas for improvement.
Step One: Define Your Objectives
Every experiment starts with a hypothesis. In the same way, every audit should begin with a specific goal. Define what you want to get out of your audit, whether that’s reducing customer churn, figuring out new sales opportunities, improving your overall customer satisfaction metrics, or identifying your competitive advantage. You don’t have to stop at one – you can have a primary goal and a few secondary ones. Or you can focus on one goal now, and then conduct additional audits in the future using the information you’ve gathered.
Step Two: Map Your Customer Journeys
Now it’s time to figure out who your customers are, what their goals are, and how they interact with you throughout the sales process. Start by identifying “customer personas“, which are detailed profiles of your various ideal customers. Think about age, income, demographics, needs, and expectations. Then map out their customer journey. This is a summation of all the different ways you expect them to interact with your brand from when they first hear about you through to when they make a purchase – or seek post-purchase care. Examples of touchpoints include ads, referrals, conversations, thank-you emails, and cancellations.
Depending on your audit goals, you can zero in on a specific area of the customer journey, or audit the journey as a whole. Each approach will tell you something valuable about the quality of customer experience you’re providing.
Step Three: Collect and Analyze Your Data
An effective audit needs cold, hard data – and a mix of the qualitative and quantitative. Use customer surveys, feedback forms, analytics data, and social media monitoring to determine how customers feel about the customer experience you provide. Doing this, you’ll be able to identify positive patterns or specific areas of friction occurring across customer groups. For example, you might locate where in the journey you’re losing customers, or which areas aren’t converting as well as you’d like. High website bounces might mean a slow-loading or confusing website, while poor conversions on your sales page might indicate pricing issues. Additionally, large numbers of post-purchase calls might show there’s a problem with your product or your onboarding instructions.
For best results, draw data from your website, your CRM platform, and your call stats. If you’re using a platform like ACD’s, you’ll have all the data you need right at your fingertips – our SaaS CX platform connects to your existing software, letting you pull end-to-end stats and data whenever you need.
Step Four: Develop Recommendations
Once you’ve identified areas of friction, you can work to do something about them. Look to your high-performance areas and make adjustments to your lower-performing ones with those in mind. Set actionable, measurable goals, and a timeframe within which to improve them. Depending on your findings, this might mean investing in training your reps, making changes to your website, or improving your FAQs and instructions. But don’t stop there! Keep auditing, measuring, and monitoring so that you can continue to make improvements as you grow and the needs of your customers shift.
Audit Automatically with ACD
Wish performing and responding to an audit were built into your daily workflows? With ACD, it can be. Our end-to-end SaaS CX platform is underpinned by continuous monitoring and analytics, empowering you to pinpoint and deal with friction quickly and easily. Plus, our pool of trained, experienced call agents helps ensure that you’re delivering quality customer care – every time. To see ACD in action, get in touch!