Customer audit portal: your gateway to serious cost savings

You’ve completed the puzzle again: all (urgent) audits are scheduled for the coming week and the right auditors with the right competencies are assigned to the relevant audits. Everything’s coming up roses. Well, for a few days at least. Because halfway through the week, the planning starts to show the first cracks again. Confronted with an unexpectedly changed customer situation, an auditor returns empty-handed. What to do now?

Changing customer situations

Deep down, you already know the answer: the assignment needs to be rescheduled. You really hope you have a suitable auditor available. No such luck. And then the customer complains that all the preparations have been in vain and he has to prepare a new appointment. What you actually already knew is that, after a few years, the customer situation is always different than the previous audit. Employees come and go, new initiatives mature and have to be included in the scope. Or major product changes have been implemented. These all have a direct impact on the calculation of the audit hours, the required competencies and qualifications.

Breath of fresh air

In addition, the preparation of each audit plan is becoming increasingly important. Unfortunately, it regularly happens that the situation at the customer’s premises only becomes really clear when the auditor is already on site, which has a major impact on the audit. Auditors spend a lot of time collecting the right, up-to-date documents as clients are generally very passive about this and often wait for the auditor to come and review the dossier on site. Although it would be a relief to be able to work without surprises for a few weeks for a change, this seems to be a utopia for many certifying bodies.

Personal customer portal

At Zertic we see it as our greatest challenge to remove every iteration, disruption and duplication from audit processes through automation. This includes managing all relevant customer information, whether it is the preparation of a quote, the creation of an audit plan or the review of evidence, linked to a non-conformity. Customers can be given access to their personal customer portal when they request their first quote. Here all relevant data is requested per type of certificate, such as number of FTEs, categories, locations and other relevant factors. Per standard these variables can and will be different.

At the touch of a button

Per standard any desired variable can be created, while for each variable it is determined whether or not it needs to be maintained by the customer in the portal. With the first request or the first subsequent audit, the customer receives an e-mail with a link and instructions to update his or her data in the portal. At the touch of a button, the impact of the changes with regard to scope, calculation and the like is determined and presented to sales and/or auditor. After all, the data is already digitally available in the ‘acquisition module’.

Audit plan

Depending on the agreements made and on the impact, it can be agreed whether the auditor will perform the audit with the new values and the extra or less work will be coordinated in an ‘end of audit letter’, or whether a quote will be formally issued. The customer’s failure to timely update the data in the portal can then serve as a trigger to pass on some of the additional costs to the customer. In addition, this data is very relevant for the preparation of the audit plan for the upcoming audit. The data is delivered in a structured way so that it is immediately included in the audit file.

Positive experiences

If the changes are minimal, the customer can reconfirm all the values in the portal with a push of a button. Furthermore, substantial changes are very easy for the customer to implement while the previous values are also undisputed. Because of this transparency, there is no discussion about the adjusted planning and costs. Both our customers and their (end) customers experience this process as very convenient. The delivery of (large quantities of) documents is also much better facilitated for the customer. Everybody knows which documents can be uploaded where and whether or not they are complete.

In short: avoid surprises for both yourself and your customer and request our demo now.