How to Audit Your Multi‑Location Customer Experience (CX) in 10 Simple Steps

Customer experiences deeply impact a business’s longevity and revenue generation. When you have multiple sites, it can be challenging to ensure that all customers have the experience needed. To standardize and improve it, a multi-location customer experience audit is a great exercise.

With location-level feedback, you can design a multi-location CX strategy for uniformity. This can have a dramatic effect on satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. In this post, you’ll learn how to audit customer experience in 10 easy steps and gain insights into why it matters and what you can expect.

Why Auditing Multi-Location CX Matters

Does customer experience really impact businesses? The easy answer is, of course, it does. People won’t stay loyal when the service is bad. It has much influence over their buying decisions. In fact, 73% of customers said experience affects their loyalty.

Inconsistencies across locations may seem like no big deal. Unfortunately, they are. When you run multiple locations, you must think of experience across the entire ecosystem. One bad apple can tarnish your brand.

When experience differs, it can begin to erode customer trust and loyalty. That harms the brand overall and can turn once-satisfied customers into detractors.

There are tangible benefits that come from auditing CX and then rolling out a plan to standardize across franchises. Those include:

• Identifying inconsistencies in customer service delivery and customer interactions and addressing them
• Finding strengths and weaknesses across locations to do more of what’s working and correct what’s not
• Improving satisfaction and loyalty with customers, no matter what location they visit
• Increasing revenue as a result of earning customers’ trust
• Optimizing your resources at each location so you have the right people in place for customer engagement
• Reducing the risk of negative public comments and brand damage
• Supporting a culture of continuous improvement

Operating without CX and brand consistency audits creates a chaotic environment. There are no standards or insights. That’s not sustainable in the long term and will compromise growth.

Auditing also isn’t a one-time thing. You’ll need to continue to conduct these regularly. The more you do, the more data you have to deliver the optimal customer experience every time.

While franchises often operate independently, they are all under the same brand umbrella, and customers won’t differentiate if they have a poor experience.

RELATED ARTICLE — How to Ensure Uniform Customer Experience Across All Franchise Units

10-Step CX Audit Checklist

Now that you know why you need a multi-location customer experience audit, let’s review how to conduct one.

What Is a CX Audit Checklist?

First, let’s define what we’re doing. This exercise encompasses following a set of action items to understand CX across locations. It’s a way to standardize the operations of CX and find ways to improve and optimize.

Here’s how to audit CX in 10 steps:

1. Define Your Objectives

Before undertaking any type of audit, start with what you hope to accomplish. If you set goals at the start, you can focus your efforts on achieving them. Some examples include:

• Improving customer satisfaction scores
• Reducing customer churn
• Speeding up response times for customer inquiries

Another decision to make at this time is establishing a regular audit cycle. Most do it quarterly. At a minimum, you should perform them twice a year.

2. Set KPIs

Your goals should align with key performance indicators (KPIs). They’ll help you later in measuring the effectiveness of your multi-location CX strategy.

KPIs to consider:

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): These scores come from asking customers for location-level feedback. It’s usually one question—”How would you rate our service?”
• Churn rate: This is the “rate” at which customers abandon your brand. The higher it is, the more likely you have serious CX issues.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS®): This rating is based on the question, “Would you recommend this company to others?” It’s a scale of 0 to 10 and measures customer loyalty.
• Customer Effort Score (CES): This measures the amount of effort required for customers to engage with your business to solve a problem.

RELATED ARTICLE — Measuring Customer Satisfaction: How NPS Drives Enhanced Customer Engagement

3. Map the Customer Journey

Next, you’ll want to craft a customer journey, which documents all the touchpoints between customers and staff. It’s designed from the customer’s perspective and involves digital, in-person, and support interactions.

With this map, you can begin to dissect experiences across the journey. It supports determining the channels where CX occurs and how consistent or inconsistent they are. Detailing these is also essential, as you’ll need this in the next steps.

You may have more than one customer persona. If so, the journeys may have variations, so you may need to create several journey maps.

4. Collect and Analyze Data

To get to the root of the customer experience, you’ll need lots of information from various sources. Data from many perspectives and interactions allows you to have complete visibility.

The data to collect for a CX audit includes:

• Customer surveys
• NPS scores
• Support tickets
• Chatbox exchanges
• Customer purchase history
• Online reviews from sites like Google Reviews, Yelp, or industry-specific platforms
• Social media engagements
• A customer’s website activity, email opens, and other marketing-related interactions

It’s a lot of information coming from lots of places. To make sense of it all, you’ll want to use a customer experience platform.

With this technology as your hub, it’s much easier to collect and analyze this valuable data.

5. Compare Performance Across Locations and with Industry Standards

This step involves benchmarking. First, look across your locations in terms of scoring and ratings on customer service (NPS, CSAT, etc.). You’ll have some that perform well while others struggle. Those at the top offer a blueprint for success.

You’ll also want to benchmark in your industry. Look at how you match up against competitors. As you do more auditing, keep looking back at these benchmarks as another way to measure the success of your strategy.

6. Evaluate Processes

Do your franchises use consistent processes for customer experience? That’s the first thing to work out. You may have internal workflows for training, how to address customer concerns, and more.

The first part of this step is to determine whether everyone is following them. Then, it’s time to assess the processes. Try to find out where bottlenecks occur or where there’s too much ambiguity about what to do.

7. Identify Pain Points and Root Causes of Poor or Inconsistent CX

With the analysis of data about customer experience and an assessment of processes, you can determine pain points and root causes. The information should present patterns and trends that lead to these conclusions.

You’ll also want to align these findings with the customer journey touchpoints. Where are things breaking down that then cause customer dissatisfaction? That is the core question to answer.

Some potential scenarios this may uncover:

• Differences in satisfaction between experiences online versus over the phone
• How slow response times correlate to lower satisfaction scores
• Confusion from customers about how to get help
• Lack of follow-up with customers

8. Develop an Action Plan

Once you’ve isolated the problems in customer experience, you have the insights needed to create action. Identifying the friction points leads to better processes and standards.

Some key things to keep in mind when making your action plan:

• Ensure you have all stakeholders engaged and involved.
• Present a visualization of the customer journey and the pain points at each touchpoint.
• Document the findings in a challenge-solution format.
• Determine internal initiatives to improve, such as more training or providing more technology tools.

9. Implement Your New CX Strategy

Once everyone signs off on the action plan, it’s time to put it into action across all locations. Each franchise should have access to the multi-location CX strategy with instructions on changes to make.

You should also have resources available to help locations adopt the plan. They may have questions or face new challenges. If you want this rollout to be successful and standardize customer experience, be ready to deliver additional support.

10. Monitor and Measure

Since you set KPIs and goals, you now have the framework to monitor and measure. Pull reports monthly to gauge how the plan is working once in play.

Watch the metrics that matter around customer satisfaction and loyalty. If things aren’t going in the right direction, it’s time for another audit to see where obstacles lie.

Monitoring and measuring ensure you have a continuous improvement loop. As new feedback comes in from customers, use that to enhance your strategy.

How Listen360 Simplifies the CX Audit Process

While the CX audit process is critical to business growth, you may feel overwhelmed by the process. To streamline auditing, Listen360 offers a turnkey customer experience platform with all the features you need in one place.

It supports CX auditing with:

• Gathering feedback in real time
• Using AI to convert input into actionable steps
• Brand reputation management

With automation and an easy-to-use platform, you can manage CX auditing across all franchises. It’s a proven solution for increasing customer satisfaction and reducing customer churn.

RELATED ARTICLE — Customer Feedback: The Growth Lever Franchisors Can’t Afford to Ignore

Final Thoughts

Customer experience should be a key differentiator for your business. However, it has to be consistent to deliver the growth you expect. When inconsistencies plague your franchises, you could be turning off customers who then never come back.

You’ll always know the state of CX at all locations by auditing regularly. What you learn from these gives you a roadmap for what to fix and optimize.

You can do it all with Listen360. Request a demo today.