Government offices and agencies face the constant challenge of doing more with less. As your staff works to fulfill more service requests, draft more documents, and create more outreach with less time and resources, Leidos is here to help. In this article, we go a little more in-depth into some specific IQ functionality that can be game-changing for offices searching for efficiencies and better ways of working. Read on to learn a few easy ways to save your staff hours each week.
IQ was created specifically to meet that challenge with a streamlined approach to your office’s essential functions and work. Optimizing your use of the tiles on your IQ homepage dashboard is a great place to start.
Tiles
Tiles on your IQ homepage give you quick access to all your work and can be used to view a staff member’s individual progress or the progress of the whole office.
- The My Work Summary tile provides one-click quick links to all your open messages, services, and files. Use this to prioritize your tasks and keep track of which of your daily progress.
- The Open Unprocessed Messages tile allows you to easily view and access the three main mailboxes of IQ: bill-related messages, advocacy messages, and individual messages. The tile displays the total unprocessed number of messages in each category, allowing easy access to them for batching. This tile can be easily changed to view Open Unprocessed Messages assigned to you or sent to your office as a whole, giving you a broader perspective.
- The Top Message Issues tile shows top issues concerning your citizens. It lists the issues found most often in messages sent to your office and totals how many messages about each topic have been received by your office. Whether about issues like the economy, healthcare, and veteran services, this tile allows you to keep an eye on what topics are most important to your citizens.
- See the batches assigned to you or all batches currently in use by your office with the Active Batches tile. By default, active batches are listed by the most to the least open messages, so you know where you are most needed.
My Inbox
In My Inbox, utilize the filters on the panel on the left of your screen. You can select specific issue codes to find messages related to one or more topics including the economy, defense and military, and education. Other helpful filters include bill position, email campaigns, and batch name. One or more filters or searches in My Open Messages can be saved to your favorites for quicker and easier access to those messages from your homepage.
You can also add a personal tag to messages, batches and campaigns, allowing you to filter them and find what you’re looking for quickly and easily.
Batching
Processing and responding to messages is made more efficient and simpler with IQ’s newer features. With the goal of getting messages assigned an issue code, assigned a staffer, and batched, The Message Processing tab is designed to walk you through each step of the message management process, ensuring no message goes unassigned or unbatched.
Batch Rules ensure that every incoming message placed in a batch is tagged with the correct issue code, assigned to the correct staffer, and receives a response. Your office’s IT Consultant can create batch rules that scan incoming messages for key words or phrases such as “requesting help,” or “meet with a Member.” Messages that fit that rule will be automatically sorted into the Possible Requests tab. From there the messages can be added into a specific batch with an assigned Form Letter that can be auto-sent on the schedule of your choice or replied to individually.
The “Active Batches” tab in Messages was created with your office’s workflow in mind. The filters are one of the best ways to streamline your work with batched messages. Filtering by the age of the message will allow you to work on messages that are most in need of a timely response. Filter by issue code or bill name to find batches with similar topics. If more than one batch has been created for a similar issue, batches can be easily merged so a single form letter can be created, approved, and automatically sent through IQ, saving you time.
You can also print or send multiple batches at the same time without clicking into any single batch by simply checking the box on the left side of each batch and selecting the “Send” or “Print” dropdown menus.
In the summary of each batch, you get a complete overview of the work accomplished and the work that still needs to be done. Next to each batch name you’ll see who is assigned to the batch, how many open messages remain. Clicking the Open Messages link will take you to the Batch Record filtered by status, excluding any Completed Messages.
To learn more batching best practices to improve efficiency, sign up for one of our live training sessions on batching. You can find the calendar here.
We continuously update IQ’s features to enhance performance and personalization.
Reach out to the Leidos team to learn how an IQ function can be created or customized for your office to optimize efficiency, allowing you to do more with less.
