How to Ensure Strong Constituent Service Through Staffing Transitions

Losing skilled and knowledgeable employees can be disruptive and costly in any industry. Staff turnover is built into democracy by definition. Seasonal interns and junior staff are hired with the assumption that the role is a stepping stone in their career. Legislative correspondents, caseworkers, and even chiefs of staff will often find themselves shifting between offices to follow their candidates.

When offices lose key staff, they risk losing:

• Understanding of bureaucratic processes and how best to navigate them
• Experience solving unique issues and knowledge of how to resolve future similar problems
• Familiarity with frequent flyers and answers to common inquiries

In an industry with a high volume of staffing transitions, how do elected officials ensure their constituents are still getting the best service?

Don’t let the effects of turnover trickle down to constituents

Constituents are reaching out to their elected representatives at higher rates, and through more channels, than ever before. Constituents also rely on elected officials at every level of government to help navigate government bureaucracy and to access social services.

So what might happen if a caseworker in an average office were to suddenly depart?

• Constituents awaiting response from an agency contact may never receive a follow up.
• Records from past interactions may be lost within the departed staffer’s messy or highly personalized storage systems.
• Responses to timely inquiries or case requests may end up backlogged as other caseworkers struggle to keep up with message volume.

As a constituent, there are few experiences that make you feel smaller than to be ignored, or worse, left hanging halfway through a critical process all because the staffer you were corresponding with left the organization. These are the kind of interactions that can massively erode trust between an elected official and the communities they serve.

How to maintain and scale institutional knowledge in elected offices

There are things offices can do to ensure constituents maintain access to the crucial services they care about. Best-in-class technology solutions for elected officials prevent the departure of key institutional knowledge, even when individual staffers depart.

Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) systems like Indigov ensure offices retain important information and maintain the processes that support positive touchpoints with every constituent, including:

• A central repository of every correspondence an office has ever had with a constituent
• The status and associated records for each ongoing case, all in a single source of truth
• A database of key contacts in other agencies or departments to liaise with on a constituent’s behalf

Turnover will always cause some level of disruption. But for the offices of elected officials, CRMs are one of the best ways to preserve their hard-won knowledge, trust, and rapport.

Indigov stabilizes constituent services during staff transitions

Supporting offices at every level of government, Indigov’s cloud-based platform is purpose-built to centralize all the systems and records that staffers and caseworkers utilize on a day-to-day basis. That way when an employee departs, the messages and cases they were responsible for can be easily picked up by another staffer.

Indigov in particular provides the elected offices with tools and features that ensure that constituents never know when things get hectic around the office.

Some of these features include:

Reminder Dates - empower caseworkers to take on more volume with stronger resolution outcomes as they can quickly set up functions to alert them when to take the next step or follow up regarding a constituent request.

Auto-Batching - enables offices to quickly filter through incoming messages, separating those that are from out of district, and grouping messages of similar content. Even during a busy season staffers will never miss those needle in a haystack messages from constituents in need.

Response Templates - help staffers quickly create professional looking email replies that can be personalized to the constituent while still keeping a consistent message.

Constituent Profiles - allow staffers to make notes on different customer interactions that help make future correspondence more effective and personal.