Why are government contact center operational audits important?  According to the Institute of Internal Auditor, an operational audit is a systematic process of assessing an organization’s effectiveness, efficiency, and economy of operations under the influence of the management and giving details of the evaluation and recommendations to suitable persons. An operational audit has a number of objectives that define the importance attributed to conducting it on a government contact center. Some of these benefits include:

1. Influence a positive change: Conducting operations audit for government contact centers assists its management to understand how future processes and policies will bring about maximum efficiency. An operations audit assists in developing clearly defined aims and strategies that will make the contact center a high performing one. An operations audit entails verifying written policies and procedures for operations.

For instance, the procedure by which employees are placed on shift sessions is evaluated. Assessing each process to determine if any of them should be combined or scrapped is also important. When these instances have been sufficiently sorted out by the operations audit, the path to positive change isn’t a lengthy and difficult journey any longer.

The employee turnover is another measure to demonstrate a positive change in a contact center. Fortunately, an operations audit evaluates this factor. When an employee has a high turnover, it may be that the manager has inadequate supervisory skills. Organizing seminars and workshops for these supervisors may help in improving the employee’s turnover.

2. Review Internal Controls: In the accounting department, internal control is a term used to describe the processes that ensure organizational aims have a positive impact on operational efficiency, reliability of financial reporting and is in compliance with rules and policies. Internal controls provide an avenue by which organizational resources are allocated, monitored, and assessed. Internal controls help in protecting organizational resources and identifying fraudulent schemes.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977 and the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 posted that there is a need to improve internal controls in public corporations including government contact centers. Truly, many a time the internal controls need improvement. However, these internal controls are key elements of the operational audit. Hence, getting to assess those internal controls helps the organization improve its performance.

3. Understand Risks: There are several risks that are susceptible to occurring during operational hours. These risks may include errors committed by personnel, IT system failure, network interruption, safety and health matters, fraud, and litigation amongst others. There may not be a definite stop to these risks, but operational audit gives us an insight into how these could happen. When a government contact center employs agents, they are given access to sensitive information about the citizens.

Contact centers often have a high turnover and average attrition which is put at about 30% in the United States. Additionally, the employees at government call centers are mostly entry-level workers. An operational audit helps the management to understand how all these threats to the security of citizen’s information may be mitigated and avoided.

Discover areas that need improvement Opportunities: A consequence of understanding risk is the recognition of faulty areas where improvement is needed. There are various forms of risk – financial risk, operational risk, environmental risk, and reputational risk. Operational audits allow the auditors to determine these risks and thus, discover opportunities to do forestall them. Conducting a regular operations audit on government contact centers allows auditors to determine how these centers can improve their services and prevent risks such as network interruption, fraud, and theft of information from happening. Every operational audit brings with it an opportunity to make positive changes and improvements, no matter how small. Thus, the role of operational audits in a high performing government contact center cannot be overlooked.