What actually happens in a CX audit: 21 days, three deliverables

"Audit" is the vaguest word on our price list. It can mean a two-hour opinion or a three-week investigation, and buyers cannot tell which one they are being sold until the invoice arrives.

So here is one of ours in full, with the numbers we actually quote: CX Audit & Customer Journey Mapping. $1,800 to $3,000, one-time. 21 days. Three artefacts at the end — an Audit Results Deck, a User Flow Scheme, and a Research Report.

The problem it exists for

Disjointed experiences across channels leak revenue and trust, and the reason they keep leaking is that no one team can see the whole path. Support sees the complaints. Paid media sees the click. Merchandising sees the basket. Nobody owns the sentence that connects them, so friction survives every quarterly review — it is always someone else's segment of the journey.

What the 21 days actually contain

Week 1 — evidence, not opinions

Analytics review plus qualitative research. We walk the journey as a customer, on the devices customers use, and we buy something. Not a heuristic checklist applied from the outside — a purchase attempt, logged step by step, with the drop-offs timed.

Week 2 — the map

The customer journey map gets built from what we recorded, cross-channel: discovery, comparison, purchase, delivery, support, return. Every step carries the evidence behind it. A CJM built from a workshop whiteboard describes the journey the team believes in. A CJM built from logs describes the one that exists.

Week 3 — prioritisation

Findings get ordered by loss, not by how easy they are to fix. That ordering is the deliverable people underestimate: it is what lets a team stop arguing about which complaint is loudest.

What lands on your desk

Audit Results Deck — what breaks the experience, where the largest losses sit, what to fix first, in a form you can take to a board without translating it. User Flow Scheme — the mapped journey with friction marked at the step where it happens. Research Report — the underlying evidence, so a sceptical engineer or CFO can check the claim rather than take it on trust.

What it looks like when it is done properly

We publish these. The TPG Mobile sign-up teardown ended with a flow that removed roughly half the steps a customer had to clear to become a customer. The Honda Australia review found the same pattern in a different industry — a configurator that answered the brand's questions rather than the buyer's.