This is an audio version of a blog article.

The original article was published here:
https://www.riskinsights.com.au/blog-1/complaints-data-audit

Why are auditors increasingly using complaints data?

Most auditors that use complaints data are interested in one or more of these three key benefits:

1. Customer complaints can provide an alternate perspective for a range of audits e.g., identifying revenue leakage like in the example above, triangulating customer requests that had not been acted on, highlighting control gaps.
2. Understanding complaints data enables audit to help management improve the complaints process e.g., how complaints are reported on.
3. Exploring the complaints data enables audit to identify strategy achievement blockers – presuming that the strategy focuses largely on customers. For example, your complaints data may point to previously unidentified problems in how services are delivered.

In this article we explore:

• the historical problem with using complaints data and why this is no longer a challenge
• what the data typically looks like – understanding complaints data
• another use case (triangulating customer requests that had not been acted on)

What the article doesn’t cover:

• The third benefit above (strategy achievement blockers) – this is an interesting angle, but we’ll leave it for a future article
• Complaints data that is recorded manually e.g., handwritten notes in a physical file. This is not impossible to analyse but converting the physical data to electronic data is a separate topic. The solutions in this article assume that the data is already in electronic form.

For more advice on analyzing data for audits, you can find The Data-Confident Internal Auditor on Amazon, with bonus resources available at data-confident.com.
The book aims to demystify the use of data in internal audits through practical, step-by-step guidance.