A Free 12-Point Diagnostic
by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
Most organizations don’t know they have a customer experience problem until it shows up as churn they can’t explain, growth that’s stalled despite strong acquisition investment, or a competitor quietly pulling ahead in a market they thought they owned.
By the time those signals are visible in the numbers, the experience failures causing them have usually been accumulating for months — sometimes years. The customers who left didn’t file complaints. They just left. The friction that drove them away wasn’t measured because nobody thought to measure it. The competitive gaps weren’t visible because nobody had walked the competitor’s journey recently enough to know they existed.
This is the fundamental challenge of customer experience management: the experiences that cost organizations the most are almost never the ones they’re already measuring.
How Do You Know If You Need an Experience Audit?
That’s the question I hear most often from leaders who are considering an Experience Audit — and it’s exactly the right question to ask before committing to any significant diagnostic investment.
The honest answer is that many organizations don’t need a full Experience Audit right now. Some have genuinely strong experience fundamentals, solid visibility into their journey gaps, and active improvement programs already addressing the right things. For those organizations, an audit would confirm what they already know — valuable, but not urgent.
Other organizations are flying blind — relying on satisfaction scores that measure the wrong touchpoints, competitive assumptions that haven’t been tested in years, and internal perspectives that have long since lost the ability to see what new customers and employees actually experience. For those organizations, an audit isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the prerequisite for every other improvement investment they’re considering.
The challenge is that it’s genuinely difficult to know which situation you’re in — from the inside.
Introducing the Free Experience Audit Readiness Checklist
I’ve developed a simple 12-point diagnostic — the Experience Audit Readiness Checklist — that helps leaders answer the “do we need an audit?” question honestly, in about five minutes, without any outside perspective required.
The checklist covers four areas:
Visibility & Awareness — Do you actually know what customers or employees experience, or are you relying on internal assumptions? When did anyone on your leadership team last go through your own journey end-to-end?
Performance Signals — Are churn, attrition, or satisfaction scores moving in the wrong direction despite investments meant to improve them?
Organizational Readiness — Do different departments have conflicting views of what the experience looks like? Have improvement initiatives failed to move the numbers you expected?
Strategic Stakes — Is a competitor improving their experience in ways starting to affect your market position? Are you considering a major investment and want to know where it will have the most impact?
A few questions that tend to generate the most honest conversation:
“Nobody on our leadership team has personally gone through our own customer or employee journey end-to-end in the last 12 months.”
“We’ve launched improvement initiatives before that didn’t move the numbers we expected them to move.”
“We’ve never formally compared our experience, touchpoint by touchpoint, against our top competitors.”
In my experience, leadership teams that read those statements and immediately think of one or two colleagues who would answer them differently have found some of their most useful conversations.
What Your Score Means
The checklist produces a simple score based on how many of the 12 items apply to your organization:
0–2 checked — Strong foundation. Keep monitoring proactively.
3–5 checked — Early warning signs worth a closer look.
6–8 checked — Meaningful blind spots likely costing you revenue.
9–12 checked — High risk. An audit should be a near-term priority.
Download the Free Checklist
The Experience Audit Readiness Checklist is available as a free PDF download — two pages, five minutes, and a clearer picture of whether your experience gaps are a background concern or a front-burner priority.
Download the free checklist on the Experience Audit page →
If you check six or more boxes and want to talk through what an Experience Audit would look like for your specific situation,contact me directly or call (206) 349-8931. I’m happy to have a no-obligation conversation about whether an audit makes sense for where you are right now.
Image Credit: Gemini
Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article, add Gemini to add images.
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