Call Your Company Voice Audit
Experience your own phone journey, quantify the baseline, and redesign the weak points.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- 99%
This audit starts with a deliberately simple act: call the company as if you were a customer. The auditor listens to the greeting, judges whether it sounds like the brand, follows the routing path, and records whether the experience is pleasant and effective. Internal data then establishes how many calls arrive, where callers are sent, how often they reach the correct destination, and which conversations are lost or mishandled. This creates a factual baseline before any new voice technology is considered. The team uses the findings to define what the interaction should sound like, how routing should work, which rules a future agent would follow, and who is accountable for improving it. Repeating the audit verifies that changes improved the real customer journey rather than merely modernizing the technology.
Origin
Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain, where the host described calling his own company and discovering more inbound conversations and poorer handling than expected.
Core principles
- 01Experience the phone journey as a customer before introducing new technology.
- 02Measure actual call volume and routing rather than assuming the phone channel is unimportant.
- 03Use firsthand evidence to expose neglected interactions.
- 04Define the desired experience only after documenting the current baseline.
- 05Repeat the audit as technology and customer expectations change.
How to run it
- 1
Verify the Entry Point
Confirm that customers can find and call a working company phone number.
Pro tip Test the number from outside the corporate network and during normal customer hours.
Watch out A published number that is broken or abandoned is itself a critical audit finding.
- 2
Call as a Customer
Place a real call and experience the greeting, waiting time, prompts, routing, transfers, and eventual resolution firsthand.
Pro tip Avoid announcing the test so the experience reflects normal operations.
Watch out Do not substitute an internal diagram for the actual caller journey.
- 3
Measure the Baseline
Determine call volume, routing destinations, transfer rates, abandonment, and whether calls reach the right people.
Pro tip Segment the data by call purpose if the phone system makes that possible.
Watch out Low internal visibility does not mean the channel has low customer usage.
- 4
Document Experience Gaps
Compare what happened with the brand experience and operational outcome the company wants to deliver.
Pro tip Separate voice-personality problems from routing and resolution problems.
Watch out Do not jump directly to buying voice AI before understanding the current failure.
- 5
Design the Target Journey
Define the desired greeting, voice, routing logic, agent rules, escalation path, and customer outcome.
Pro tip Prioritize the highest-volume or most damaging gap first.
Watch out A modern voice cannot compensate for broken routing or unclear ownership.
- 6
Assign Accountability
Give a named owner responsibility for implementing improvements and measuring progress.
Pro tip Set a date for the next test call when assigning the work.
Watch out An audit without ownership becomes an observation rather than an improvement process.
- 7
Reaudit the Experience
Call again after deployment and compare the new journey with the recorded baseline.
Pro tip Use the same scenarios so results remain comparable.
Watch out Do not assume a configuration change produced the intended customer outcome.
In the wild
A company calls its own public number and discovers that a confusing automated menu routes prospective buyers into a general voicemail box. Call records show substantially more inbound sales conversations than managers expected. The company creates a direct sales route, rewrites the greeting, and assigns an owner to monitor unanswered calls.
→ Previously neglected demand becomes visible and receives an intentional response.
A subscription business discovers that its support line opens with an outdated robotic message that does not identify the brand or explain expected wait times. It replaces the greeting, simplifies the routing choices, and repeats the audit with common support scenarios.
→ The phone experience becomes clearer, more pleasant, and more consistent with the brand.
Common mistakes
Buying Technology Before Auditing
New voice technology may disguise rather than solve broken routing, unclear ownership, or an unknown call baseline.
Assuming Nobody Calls
Phone-system data is often overlooked, so teams can underestimate the volume and value of existing conversations.
Auditing Without Accountability
Findings do not produce progress unless someone owns the target experience, implementation, and follow-up test.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for organizations with a public phone number, support line, sales line, or automated answering system.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal for businesses that intentionally provide no phone-based customer interaction and have validated that decision.
From the transcript
“But call your company. And does it have this old school robotic answering? Does it sound like your company at all? Is it a pleasant…”
“So I would actually just go and just understand where the baseline is, understand how many people call that number, how do they get routed…”
“I did this a few years ago, and it was literal gold. We had way more conversations coming in than we thought, and we were…”
From the episode
This Is the End of Chatbots