I am looking for creative methods to obtain customer feedback on our audit processes. What do other audit deparments do? We used to send surveys, but we are researching other ways where we might get more valuable and insightful feedback. Please provide your ideas! Thank you.
Dear Running Girl, if customer means the auditee, then the obective of these Surveys/Questionnaires is to obtain ideas to identify opportunities for improving efficiency and effectiveness of internal audit activity.
In my opinion following should be considered while designing feedback forms assuring the auditee that their names and other credentials will be kept secret so that auditee can comment freely and fairly:
1- Auditors’ demonstration and promotion of ethical behavior. 2- Technical proficiency of the internal auditors. 3- Professionalism of the internal auditors. 4- Communication skills of the internal auditors. 5- Value added by Internal Audit. 6- Appropriateness of attention to areas of risk. 7- Duration of audits. 8- Usefulness of the audit process. 9- Timeliness of reports on audits or consulting projects. 10- Accuracy, clarity, and completeness of audit reports. 11- Follow-up on corrective actions taken by the management. 11- Inclusion of customers' suggestions for areas to be audited.
The QAR manual has a sample survey and in the several QARs that I have done, most companies have used it as their model and have surveyed regularly. Surveys give broad coverage fairly simply and doing them anonymously is an advantage.
I've also seen an outline for a post-audit interview, where the lead on the audit has a discussion with the business process owner. The focus is on efficiencies for next time and on the most useful analyses in the audit. This approach can get to "soft" issues the discussion can improve the feedback.
One thought on the topic - don't be discouraged. It's easy to say that the survey results are always between 3.5 and 3.7 so they don't tell us much about how we are doing and they aren't very useful. At least the business folks are going to know that Internal Audit is concerned with customer satisfaction and with solicition suggestions.
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Gary Opinions are mine. Noone else is responsible.
Wednesday February 15, 2012 10:04 AM
