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A buyer's checklist for choosing 311 software

Forty practical questions to ask any 311 vendor, grouped by who in the city cares about them. Print it and bring it to your next demo.

By the Sentra 311 team · · 4 min read

Choosing 311 software is a decision that touches residents, crews, office staff, IT, finance and council. Each group cares about different things. This checklist groups the questions by who will ask them. Use it with any vendor, including us.

For residents

  1. Can a resident report a problem in under a minute on a phone?
  2. Is an account required to report? (It shouldn't be.)
  3. Can the resident start with a photo, and does the photo's location fill in the map?
  4. Are reports outside city limits caught before they're sent?
  5. Does the resident get a tracking number and a link right away?
  6. Are updates sent only when something changes?
  7. Can residents see a photo of the fix?
  8. Is the report flow available in Spanish, and other languages your residents speak?
  9. Does a referral to another agency show as a referral, not "Closed"?
  10. Can residents get answers to common questions without filing?

For the front desk and call-takers

  1. Can phone calls and walk-ins go into the same list as online reports?
  2. Can staff look up a resident's past requests?
  3. Are common answers available on screen during a call?
  4. Can duplicates be merged so everyone gets the same updates?
  5. Can staff reply to residents from the request, in their language?

For public works and crews

  1. Does each request route to the right department automatically, including by district?
  2. Do due dates follow business hours, holidays and your time zone?
  3. Can a dispatcher plan routes for several workers at once, along real streets?
  4. Does the worker app work with gloves and in the sun: big buttons, high contrast?
  5. Can workers hand a job to someone else?
  6. Can the city require proof, such as an after photo, before closing?
  7. Can crews report new problems from the field?
  8. Does the app work without signal? (Ask for the plan if it's not ready.)

For supervisors and managers

  1. Can you see requests by council district for any date range?
  2. Can reports be emailed on a schedule to people without accounts?
  3. Are worker efficiency numbers based on field activity, with medians rather than averages?
  4. Can you see SLA performance by department and request type?
  5. Is there a public page residents can see, and do you control what's on it?

For IT

  1. Is there a documented API, and is it the same one the product uses?
  2. Does it support Open311?
  3. Are webhooks signed?
  4. How are cities kept separate, and how is that tested?
  5. Are permissions enforced on the server?
  6. Can you export all your data at any time?
  7. Does it connect to your GIS layers?
  8. Is single sign-on available, or when?
  1. Which WCAG version and level does the vendor test against, and how often?
  2. Is there a current VPAT or accessibility conformance report?
  3. What happens to residents' data, and how long is it kept?

For finance

  1. Is the price based on population or on seats? Are field workers charged?
  2. How does the price change at renewal, and is that written into the agreement? Are there discounts for multi-year agreements?

How to use the checklist

Ask for a demo with your own examples. Bring three real requests from last month, with addresses, and ask the vendor to walk through them end to end.

Ask "is that live today?" for anything that sounds new. Roadmap items are fine, as long as you know which ones they are.

Talk to the people who'll use it. Have a crew lead and a call-taker sit in on the demo.

Check the whole cost. Setup, training, data migration, add-ons for AI or text messages, and what happens at renewal.

Red flags in a demo

A few things are worth a second question if you see them:

  • The demo only uses the vendor's sample data, never an address in your city.
  • Every answer to "is that live?" is "it's coming soon."
  • Field workers, translation or AI are priced as separate add-ons that only come up late in the conversation.
  • The vendor can't show you what a resident sees when a request is sent to another agency.
  • Reports need a specialist or an export to a spreadsheet to answer simple questions.

Where Sentra 311 stands

We've written about most of these topics on this blog: closed means closed, dispatch, council district reports, accessibility, IT integration and pricing. Where something is on our roadmap rather than live, those articles say so.

If you'd like to go through the checklist with us, get a demo.

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