by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you’ve already decided you need an outside look at your customer experience, and you’re now at the awkward stage of comparing the people who offer one. Proposals have arrived. They all use similar words. Every one of them promises “actionable insights,” a phrase that has been used so often it now carries about as much information as “best wishes.”
So here’s something more useful than another brochure: a list of questions that will tell you what you’re actually buying. Ask them of anyone you’re considering, including me. A good provider will be glad you asked. If a question makes someone defensive, that’s information too.
1. “Who will actually do the work?”
This is the question I’d ask first, because it’s the one most often answered with a shrug.
In many firms, the person who sells the engagement and the people who deliver it are different people. That isn’t automatically a problem, but you should know it going in. Ask who will conduct the research, who will do the fieldwork and who will write the findings. Ask what their experience is. Ask how much of the work the person you’re talking to will personally touch.
An audit depends on judgment: noticing what’s strange, what’s missing, what an experienced eye catches that a checklist doesn’t. If that judgment sits with someone you never meet, you’re paying for a process, not for insight.
2. “Do you actually walk the journey, or review it from documents?”
This question separates a real audit from a desk exercise.
There’s an enormous difference between analyzing the materials a company provides and experiencing the journey the way a customer does: visiting the location, going through the digital channel, making the service call, sitting through the sales cycle. The materials show you what the organization believes happens. The fieldwork shows you what actually happens, and in my experience that’s where the most valuable surprises live.
Ask exactly which touchpoints will be experienced firsthand, in which channels, and by whom. If the answer is mostly interviews and dashboards, you may be buying a more expensive version of what your team could already produce.
3. “What, specifically, will I receive at the end?”
“A report and a presentation” is not an answer. Ask for specifics.
You want to know what the deliverables actually contain: validated personas, journey maps with pain points and emotional highs and lows, an evaluation of your existing data, findings from the fieldwork, a gap analysis, a prioritized set of recommendations. And ask the question that matters most: will I be able to hand this to my team on Monday and have them start?
Better yet, ask to see an example, anonymized if need be. A provider who can’t show you what the output looks like is asking you to buy on faith.
4. “How independent are you?”
This one is subtle and important. An audit is only as credible as the independence of the person doing it.
Ask whether the provider also sells the solutions the audit might recommend: software, implementation services, a platform, ongoing consulting. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a firm that sells both, but it’s a structural conflict, and a recommendation that happens to match the provider’s product line deserves a raised eyebrow.
An independent audit has one job: to tell you what’s true. If the provider has nothing to sell you afterward, that changes the quality of the advice in ways you’ll notice.
5. “How do you decide which problems matter most?”
Any decent audit will find a lot of friction. Your customers don’t need a list of forty problems. They need to know which five to fix first.
Ask how the provider prioritizes: by customer impact, by cost, by effort, by revenue at risk? Ask whether they’ll connect findings to money. A recommendation with a rough sense of what it’s worth and what it costs gets funded. A recommendation that says “improve onboarding” gets a polite nod and a lifetime on a to-do list.
(If you want to size the problem before you talk to anyone, the CX ROI Calculator is a good way to put a number on what friction is currently costing you.)
6. “How do you handle benchmarking, and is it optional?”
Comparing your experience with competitors and best-in-class examples can be extremely valuable, particularly when you’ve been losing deals to experience, not to price. But it isn’t right for every engagement.
Ask whether benchmarking is included, how the comparison set is chosen, and what you’d lose by skipping it. A provider who treats everything as mandatory may be padding the scope. One who treats everything as optional may not be helping you decide.
7. “What does scope depend on, and what would change the price?”
Be wary of anyone who quotes a number before asking you a single question about your business. Costs in this work tend to follow the depth of the engagement: how many audiences, how many touchpoints across how many channels, how much existing data there is to evaluate, how many places need to be experienced in person, and how quickly you want it done.
A good scoping conversation will ask about all of that. It will also tell you which choices drive cost and which levers you can pull to bring it down. If the quote arrives without that conversation, you’re probably looking at a package, not an answer to your situation.
8. “How long will it take, and what do you need from us?”
Ask for a realistic timeline and for what the provider will need from your side: access to data, access to people, access to places. Audits stall when the client’s side isn’t ready. A provider who tells you plainly what they need from you, and when, is likely one who has done this before.
9. “What happens after the report?”
Some audits end with a handoff. Some include help with next steps. Neither is wrong, but you should know which you’re getting. Ask whether the provider will walk your team through the findings, whether there’s a way to ask follow-up questions as you plan, and how the recommendations are meant to be turned into action. The worst outcome of any audit is a thoughtful report that nobody acts on.
10. “Can I talk to someone you’ve worked with?”
References still matter. Ask for a conversation with a past client, ideally one with a situation similar to yours. And ask that client the question that gets the most honest answer: “What would you do differently if you were hiring them again?”
A short scorecard
If you’d like to keep this simple, you can rate each provider on five things:
- Who does the work: the people you meet are the people who deliver.
- Fieldwork: the journey is experienced, not just reviewed.
- Deliverables: you can describe what you’ll receive in specific terms.
- Independence: the provider has no stake in what you buy next.
- Prioritization: findings are tied to impact, cost and effort.
A provider who scores well on all five is rare enough that you should probably hire them before someone else does.
Hold me to the same standard
I’d be a hypocrite if I wrote this list and didn’t invite you to apply it to my own work. The Customer Experience Audit page explains how an independent engagement runs, from audience research and persona validation through journey mapping, data evaluation, firsthand fieldwork and optional competitive benchmarking, and I’m glad to answer every question on this list directly. If a few of the terms are new to your team, the Experience Design Glossary is a quick way to get everyone speaking the same language before the conversations start.
Whoever you choose, ask the hard questions first. The audit you hire is only as useful as the questions you asked before you hired it.
Image Credits: 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.
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