As an operations professional, you understand the importance of guest satisfaction for your organization’s success. In fact, it comes as no surprise that regular assessments of your brand standards are critical—even essential—in enforcing them across all locations. When it comes to setting up a regular brand audit program, we’d like to offer 3-step process to capture and measure how your brand is delivering its promise.

Step 1: Create a Checklist

The goal is to establish a robust brand assurance assessment checklist to guide the audit process. The checklist will guide the auditor through all the necessary checkpoints. Keep your checklist dynamic, with the ability to be as general or as detailed as possible. If auditors find areas that require further investigation, the checklist should include room to capture that data.Once complete, the standard checklist will help the auditor get back on track to complete the audit.

To create your checklist, start by reviewing your brand standards and policies. Are they clearly measured? Also review any previous audits (in other areas, if brand audits are new for you), corrective actions, procedures, documents and other relevant materials. Look to identify trends and questions that are duplicated or omitted. Are there key areas of concern? Determine the standards you want to enforce across your business and include them in your checklist for regular review.

For brand audits specifically, consider if your checklist answers the following questions: Does our brand deliver what our customers really want? Does our brand stay current on market conditions? Does our brand invest in improvements to provide better value to our customers? Is our pricing strategy is based on customers’ perception of our brand’s value? Is our brand is properly positioned within the marketplace? Is there clear distinction from our competitors? Is our marketing and messaging consistent with what we deliver? And, is there any conflicting messages? Is our brand properly positioned within our corporate structure? Do other corporate sub-brands overlap? Do executives and managers understand what our brand means to our customers? Is our service/product delivered according to our corporate mission, policies and/or quality standards?

With the checklist criteria established, make sure you include written policies, photos, and instructions about how to assess the standard with each question. Give your auditors what they need to know in order to do a thorough review of your brand deliverability. A scoring methodology should account for the importance of your brand standards as they relate to guest experience and satisfaction. For each area to review on your checklist, create a method for scoring it. Over time, you can start to identify areas that need improvement, as well as those where your brand excels.

Step 2: Use Technology to Collect Data and Automate the Corrective Action Management Process

Using a web-based solution drives standardization, automates the audit process, enhances follow-up, and even generates automated reporting. Mobile data-collection tools, such as RizePoint’s mobileAUDITOR, replaces paper inspection forms with electronic audits, and eliminates the need for manual reports. It also allows for photographs of issues to be associated to the audit. Trending on root causes becomes significantly easier as well. Additionally, your audit results are archived in a business intelligence warehouse. Corrective action management tools will automatically dispatch the issues to the appropriate person or team, and will allow you to monitor the process of the corrective action through to completion.

Setting up corrective action plan approval processes assure that the non-compliant item is being dealt with properly. For example, if the carpet is dirty, you would want it to be cleaned – not replaced. Automatic notification technology simplifies the ability to keep on top of your program. Using it allows you to know when a question, a category, or an audit falls below the acceptable standard criteria. It can also be used to remind your locations or your management team to follow up when items are unresolved.

Step 3: Track Improvement Through Business Intelligence Tools

To consistently deliver your brand promise requires a clear vision into what is happening by correlating operations data and understanding of which “best practices” to replicate. You should be able to transform your business by viewing your key performance metrics and passing them along to those who make strategic decisions. Not only knowing what is happening, but more importantly why something is happening will drive your program and your company to new levels of success Regardless of the format you use to monitor your brand delivery, remember the most important aspect: view your brand through the eyes of your customer rather than through your own knowledge of your organization.

At RizePoint, our goal is to make the auditing process simple, quicker, and more accurate. With audit forms built into RizePoint 360 (and customizable), each audit receives uniform data that’s captured in a central location for review, analysis, and next steps. If you’d like to find out how RizePoint can help you set up brand audits for your company, check out our “Audit Fatigue” white paper.