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What Others Are Saying About the Importance of Experience Audits

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What Others Are Saying About the Importance of Experience Audits

by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

I have an obvious stake in this topic, so let me say it up front: I offer experience audits, and I think they’re valuable. That makes me a poor judge of whether you should believe me.

So I went looking for what other people say. Consultants, researchers, a Big Four firm, a government order, and companies that sell software to channel teams. They work in different industries, look at different audiences and, in most cases, have never heard of each other. And yet when I lined their words up, the same handful of ideas kept showing up.

Here’s what I found, organized by the kind of audit each person was talking about: customer, employee, partner and citizen.

Customer experience audits: seeing what you’ve stopped seeing

The customer side is the best-documented, so let’s start there. The recurring theme is that an audit gives you something your internal reports can’t: an honest, outside view.

Customer experience audit

“An audit provides value to an organization through an independent view of all the customer touch points.”

Bryan Comite, managing director at Protiviti, writing in Quirk’s, June 2018

The word doing the work there is independent. People inside an organization have walked the same path so many times that the friction has become invisible to them. Someone from outside sees it in the first ten minutes.

Customer experience audit

“A thorough audit uncovers the real, sometimes gritty truth of how customers interact with your brand at every touchpoint.”

Lauren Basiura, Marketing Insider Group, May 2024

I like “gritty” there, because it’s accurate. The truth about your customer experience is rarely flattering and rarely tidy. It lives in the confusing confirmation email and the phone tree that loses people, not in a dashboard.

Customer experience audit

“By putting yourself in your customers’ shoes during an audit, you’ll naturally stumble into customer pain points.”

Ryan Kane, The CX Lead, updated February 2026

Stumble into is exactly right. You don’t need a sophisticated analytical model to find the biggest problems. You need to experience the journey the way a customer does, which is why walking it firsthand sits at the center of any audit worth doing.

Customer experience audit

“Customer experience audits offer something every organisation needs: clarity.”

Kaarle Parikka, Falcony, April 2026

Clarity is the word I’d put on the side of the building. Most organizations don’t lack data. They lack a clear picture of what the data means.

Employee experience audits: the score isn’t the story

On the employee side, the most useful observation I found was about the limits of the number most organizations rely on.

Employee experience audit

“An engagement score tells you the temperature. It rarely tells you which moment in the journey set it.”

Mutomorro, employee experience audit service page

Every leader who has ever stared at a flat or falling engagement score knows this feeling. You know something is wrong. You don’t know where. The same page makes the next point that matters:

Employee experience audit

“The audit finds that moment, so the fix is to redesign it rather than nudge the number.”

Mutomorro, same page

Redesign it rather than nudge the number is a useful warning against the most common mistake in this area, which is launching a program aimed at the score instead of at the experience that produces it.

Employee experience audit

“The goal of this audit is clarity, not complexity.”

Advantage Club, January 2026

Clarity again. It’s becoming a theme.

Partner experience audits: the experience you don’t own, but customers blame you for

Partner experience gets far less attention than either customers or employees, and I suspect that’s why it’s where many organizations are most exposed. Your resellers, distributors, integrators and suppliers deliver pieces of your customer experience, and when they struggle to work with you, your customers feel it.

Partner experience audit

“If you can’t see how your partners actually feel, you can’t fix what’s broken.”

Marketopia, June 2026

The same article makes an observation about how most vendors check in with partners: “Most vendor channel programs measure partner satisfaction the same way. Anecdotally.” Anecdotes are fine for color. They’re a poor basis for investment.

Partner experience audit

“As noted in research from PartnerPath, nearly 70% of vendors do not measure partner experience.”

Trevor Burnett, Impartner, October 2023

Read that again. Nearly 70% don’t measure it at all. If that’s even roughly right, then a partner experience audit is the rare opportunity to learn something your competitors probably don’t know either.

Partner experience audit

“Collecting partner feedback without acting on it is worse than not collecting it at all.”

Unifyr, Partner Experience glossary entry

I’d put that on a poster in every department that runs surveys, and not only in the channel team.

Citizen experience audits: measuring dignity, not just delivery

Governments face the same problem as companies, with higher stakes and fewer alternatives for the people on the receiving end. The best line I found on the public-sector side was also the most uncomfortable.

Citizen experience audit

“Most governments measure whether a service was delivered. Very few measure whether the person receiving it felt treated with dignity.”

Julian Ford, Renascence, August 2026

Delivered versus dignified is a gap that applies to far more than government, and I’d invite any organization to ask which side of it they’re measuring.

Citizen experience audit

“When improving citizen experience, government organisations need to get to the root of what citizens really need.”

KPMG UK, Re-visit citizen journeys, July 2023

The root, not the symptom. And at the policy level, the U.S. federal government made a version of the same argument in a 2021 order on customer experience, which called for services “driven fundamentally by the voice of the customer” and pointed agencies to “human-centered design methodologies such as journey mapping.”

What they all have in common

Put these voices side by side and a pattern emerges, regardless of whether the audience is a customer, an employee, a partner or a citizen.

Scores and surveys can’t tell you where the problem is. Whether it’s an engagement score, a satisfaction rating or the “anecdotal” feedback on a channel program, the measurement tells you something is off without telling you what or where.

An outside view sees what insiders can’t. The word “independent” appears in the customer quotes, and the same idea runs through the others. If you’ve lived with a process for years, you’ve stopped noticing it.

The point is clarity, then action. Two different writers reach for the same word. A clear picture is the goal, and a clear picture that nobody acts on is the failure mode the partner quote warns about.

You have to walk it. “Put yourself in your customers’ shoes.” “Map the journey from the citizen’s starting point, not the department’s.” The findings that matter most come from experiencing the journey, not reading about it.

A fair caution

I should be honest about the limits of this exercise. Many of the voices above work for companies that sell related services or software, so they have a reason to agree with me. Their view isn’t neutral, and neither is mine. What I’d ask you to notice is that they arrived at similar conclusions from very different starting points, and that the conclusions hold up against your own experience. Think about the last time a score told you something was wrong without telling you why.

Where to start

If you’re not sure which audience to look at first, I’d start where your revenue or your risk is concentrated, and add the others as you can. If you’d like to put a number on what friction is costing you before you commit to anything, the CX ROI Calculator and the Employee Experience ROI Calculator are both free. If a few terms in this article are new to your team, the Experience Design Glossary will get everyone speaking the same language.

And if you’d like to talk about what an independent experience audit would look like for your organization, the Customer Experience Audit page explains how it works, and I’m glad to talk through your situation.

Sources

Image Credits: ChatGPT

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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