iConstituent: Bolstering the People- Government Relations

iConstituent

Zain Khan, Co Founder and CEO, ICONSTITUENTZain Khan, Co Founder and CEO
As interactions between people and government have become part and parcel of every administrative mechanism, governments are looking for solutions that help them communicate with the people effectively. Moreover, owing to the increased use of mobile devices, governments are more than ever inundated by constant requests that include grievances and inquiries. They are obliged to respond to the same promptly, and they struggle to respond to this flood of information. In this interview with Zain Khan,, the CEO and Stuart S. Shapiro, The President of iConstituent, they describe how the company’s solutions help governments respond to their citizens quickly, efficiently, and economically.

What were the founding factors that led to the conception of iConstituent?

iConstituent was established in the year 2002. We realized that all government administrations, including state, local, and federal governments fail to respond to its citizens efficiently. Governments are putting their heads together to find an efficient way to respond to their citizens. We offer them the ability to communicate to the citizens quickly, efficiently, and economically through our platform, the Constituent Relationship Management (CRM.) Unlike legacy tools that are generally created for the corporate world, we come with a platform that is completely dedicated to government constituents. As our solution is cloud-based and allows third-party integration, clients can gain additional benefits. For example, the integration with social media websites and applications have considerably increased over the years. The platform takes into consideration engagements and interactions with the same. The platform is easy to access as it is browser-based and cloud-hosted and can be accessed through a mobile device. iConstituent stands out from the rest as our platform is easy to implement and use. We have spent an inordinate amount of time to bring industry best practices while developing the software. This is well reflected in the UI of our platform. This makes the product, intuitive, simple and essentially joyful to use. The platform also leverages AIand responds to personalized messages without the user needing to send it manually.

We have been serving elected officials in the government and the US Congress for over 20 years. As such, our IP for both the development and executive management level has been devoted only to this marketplace, and we are probably the only company in the market that has a profound legacy.

What are some of the recent trends that you see in the government tech landscape?

Governments at all levels are migrating their software infrastructures to the cloud.

Unlike commercial software that is designed for a variety of purposes, we focus entirely on government machinery


When we first began, the entire software stack was hosted on-premise. However, the situation evolved, and now they are more comfortable with using cloud-based systems.The second biggest change that we are undergoing today is the adoption of social media to connect and engage with the citizens. While choosing a solution, they also look for technical aspects, including third-party integration, options for targeted emailing, and texting with integrated correspondence management.

Could you tell us more about the platform that you offer?

We aim to help governments keep pace with an ever-connected public. Our platform can be integrated and synchronized with Outlook, Gmail, or domiciliary email systems. The unique advantage it offers to caseworkers and managers at government-citizen outreach centers is the ability to gain a meaningful view out of thousands of emails received through these third-party systems and filters out segments based on the subject. Key templates for each of these segments can be reused by the user for efficient and time-saving processing of the numerous citizen queries. The additional ability to extract progress reports and tracking cases from the complete history of conversations is another feature most welcomed by caseworkers

Can you cite a customer success story?

In an instance, a local government that had no experience using a digital platform for managing the constituentrelationship approached us. The client was using spreadsheet files to manage their entire communication with the citizens. It became impossible for them to follow through the excel files due to the piling up of enquires and requests from the people. After implementing our constituent relationship management platform, they were able to communicate efficiently without much delay.

In another instance, a client who was using legacy software approached us with a requirement. The legacy software proved to be of no use as they couldn’t access it on modern-day web browsers. The client deployed our solution and was successful in making an immediate impact on their office’s efficiency to communicate with their constituents.

What are some of the key differentiators of iConstituent?

One of the key differentiating factors about our software is its patent-pending process that involves texting. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that accessibility helps us to stand out from the crowd. Unlike commercial software that is designed for a variety of purposes, we focus entirely on government machinery. We keep innovating and bring new features and functionalities to its platform to stay competitive and thereby make our customers more efficient. Innovation makes us more powerful when it comes to our solutions. This is well reflected from the kind of services we deliver. We strive to widen our solutions to more than 50,000 elected representatives across the US.

What does the future hold for your company?

We want to make our products more user-friendly by adding features powered by AI and collaboration into the product. Through this, we also aim at managing the responses effectively. We believe that there is a huge opportunity for not just a higher-level state and local offices, but there are 500,000 elected officials in the United States, looking for a solution. So we are building a simple, easy to use, and easy to set up the solution and enable our clients to manage inbound and outbound communications with proper data management.

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