Is Your Business Easy to Do Business With? A Customer Journey Checklist

Monica Habersack • September 3, 2026

I make my clients do something uncomfortable at least once a year: pretend to be their own customer, start to finish.

Google your business like a stranger would. Call your own number. Fill out your own contact form. Try to book yourself an appointment. Almost every time, they find at least one thing that's quietly been getting in a customer's way — something they'd never have noticed from the inside.

You don't need an outside audit to catch most of this. You just need to walk your own journey, honestly, the way a first-time customer would. Here's the checklist I use.

1. Your Google Listing

Search your business the way a stranger would — not by your business name, but by what you actually do ("massage therapist near me," "roofing contractor in [your city]"). Is your listing accurate? Current hours? Recent reviews? A profile photo that isn't five years old?

This is often the very first impression a customer has of you, before your website even loads.

2. Your Website

Load it on your phone, on regular data, not office wifi. Does it load quickly? Is it obvious within a few seconds what you do and who you help? Can you find a phone number or booking link without hunting?

3. Your Phone

Call your own business number. What happens? Does it ring through to a real person, a clear voicemail, or dead air? If someone else usually answers, when's the last time you actually listened to how that call goes?

4. Your Contact Form

Fill it out yourself, right now. Is it short enough that a busy person would actually finish it? Do you get any confirmation that it went through, or does it feel like typing into a void?

5. Your Booking Process

Friction-Heavy Call during business hours, wait for a callback, confirm by phone, no reminder before the appointment.

Friction-Light Book online in under two minutes, get an instant confirmation, receive an automatic reminder the day before.

Which one does your business actually offer today? Most owners assume it's closer to the second than it really is.

6. Your Response Time

"Time yourself. From the moment a lead comes in to the moment someone actually responds — is it minutes, hours, or days?"

Most business owners have never actually timed this. It's worth knowing.

7. Your Payment Process

Is paying you easy, or does it involve an invoice emailed as a PDF, a mailed check, or a payment link that doesn't work on mobile? Friction at the finish line is still friction — and it's the last impression before someone becomes a repeat customer.

8. Your Follow-Up

After someone becomes a customer, what happens? Is there a check-in, a thank-you, a next step — or does the relationship go quiet the moment the invoice is paid?

9. Your Review Process

Do you actually ask happy customers for a review, or hope they think of it themselves? Is there a simple, one-click way to leave one, or does it require finding your business on three different platforms?

A Couple Questions I Get a Lot

"What if I find five problems at once — where do I even start?"

Start with whichever step loses you the most people, not whichever is easiest to fix. Usually that's response time or the booking process — the two places where a mildly interested person becomes a not-interested person fastest.

"Do I need to do this myself, or can someone else test it?"

Both are useful, but someone else — a friend, a family member, an employee who doesn't normally handle this — will catch things you've gone blind to simply from familiarity. Fresh eyes find different gaps than you will.

Try It This Week

Pick one hour. Go through all nine, start to finish, exactly as a first-time customer would. You'll likely find at least one gap you didn't know was there — most business owners do.

If you'd rather have a second set of eyes on it, that's exactly what our Free Digital Health Check is for — a full walkthrough of your customer journey, with the gaps flagged for you.

Book Your Free Discovery Session