Improving the constituent experience at the 2018 Northern California Assessors' Association Conference

This past week I attended the Northern California Assessors Conference (NCAA) in South Lake Tahoe, CA. This conference provided an opportunity to network with county assessors across the region and understand opportunities to maximize success.

Throughout the conference, one theme that I continued to see across conversations was how to improve process efficiency. Some questions that kept coming up were; “How can I make life easier for my employees?”, “Is there a faster more efficient way to work with citizens?”, “Are we able to communicate effectively with the landowners in our county?”. These were the kinds of questions that continued to come up because efficient and seamless front-end processes are extremely important to the taxpayer. And, for the most part, the 28 county assessor’s, recorders, and staff in attendance recognize that their number one goal is to better serve their constituents.

That is specifically the reason why I attended the event on Experian’s behalf. Everyone I spoke with valued the fact that we can offer solutions to the market that can help improve front-end citizen facing processes. I had the opportunity to sit down with a couple of our existing customers and they were happy to go into more detail on how our solutions have helped them more effectively serve their community. More broadly, the value that data quality solutions provide was made known throughout the event. 

Overall, one of the most significant takeaways from this year’s NCAA conference is that contact data management will always be a working project for these counties. More importantly, achieving quality data should not be thought of as a project with a beginning, middle, and end, but as an ongoing priority. The general consensus throughout the event was that the elusive ‘golden record’ of citizen contact data can seem impossible to achieve because of so many external factors, data collection points, and moving pieces. One attendee discussed this issue with me at length. He explained, “Addresses are always an ongoing battle because of various collection points across multiple departments—including Assessors, Recorders, Treasurer’s, and Tax Collectors”. After our conversation, I had no doubt in my mind that one of his takeaways from this year’s NCAA conference that there is, in fact, a solution to this persistent challenge—and it lies with Experian. 

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