SYNTHESIS / ANALYSIS TECHNIQUE • RESEARCH DELIVERABLE
25 Customer Experience Audit
Customer experience audits capture the day-to-day context in which people engage with your product or service.
Experiences do not exist in a vacuum—rather, they unfold over time, and are shaped by many factors. A customer experience audit captures what customers do, think, and use as they complete a task or set out to achieve a goal that involves your product or service. It provides a framework that design teams can use to isolate specific moments of delight, apathy, or frustration over the course of an entire experience—which includes the before, during, and after phases of an experience. By breaking up an experience into its salient moments, designers and researchers can evaluate how each moment either contributes to or diminishes an experience—regardless of whether it directly or indirectly involves the product or service. Individual moments can then be transformed into the sources of design team inspiration, from which opportunities for innovation can be identified.
When conducting a customer experience audit, it is important for designers to frame their work with rich, qualitative data that reflects people’s social, environmental, and financial realities as well as their underlying beliefs, values, and desires. For instance, interviews and directed storytelling can both reveal the journeys people experience and inspire the content of the audit. The fact-based events that comprise an experience audit can only spring to life when the design team understands the context—or frame—of the experience, which may be different for different people. It is only with this understanding that teams can identify which touch points are emotional triggers, which are influenced by contextual factors, where customers need help and where they want to help themselves, and which moments are habitual or “commonplace” (and therefore ripe for innovation). Experience audits can also help researchers isolate the areas where they may need to conduct more research and where gaps in the service or product offering exist.
To keep up with changing social, economic, and technical factors, the customer experience audit should be conducted repeatedly to communicate people’s experience with your product over the course of its life cycle. Use it to humanize data, and as a framework to tell a compelling story about people as they interact with your product or service in a larger, real-world context. Ideally, the findings will help design teams to formalize a beginning-to-end commitment to the point of view of the people engaging with a specific product or service as it plays out over time, and ultimately design better products that augment customers’ existing contexts and behaviors.