Collaboratively Centering the “Customer Experience” in New York State: A Digital Service Network Spotlight 

Background

New York State is one of the largest providers of public benefits in the country for its population of nearly 20 million. But bureaucratic hurdles like lengthy forms and long processing times impede residents’ access to these benefits and other government resources. 

In 2023, Governor Kathy Hochul announced a plan to improve residents’ experiences accessing government programs including childcare, nutrition support, and tax refunds. In her 2023 State of the State Address, she committed to investing in more robust digital infrastructure to eliminate things like duplicative forms, dense language, and the “time tax.” “By eliminating bureaucratic hurdles, simplifying processes, and utilizing new technology, we will vastly improve the way New Yorkers’ access services and benefits from state agencies,” Governor Hochul said.

To advance these goals across the state’s 100+ agencies, Governor Hochul created the position of “chief customer experience officer,” or CXO. This role collaborates with a longstanding team in the Office of Information Technology Services (ITS) focused on human-centered design. Together, they support agencies’ digitization efforts with a focus on residents’ needs. 

To learn more, the Beeck Center’s Digital Service Network (DSN) spoke with Chief Customer Experience Officer Tonya Webster, Assistant Secretary for Technology Gabe Paley, and ITS Director of Digital Experience Luke Charde.

The state’s first CXO

As part of her commitment, Governor Hochul appointed Webster as the first CXO of New York State. At the highest level, Webster oversees the design and execution of an improved government experience for New York residents by developing service standards for all agencies and providing data-backed user experience insights to inform continuous improvement. 

Relationship-building with agency leadership is integral to Webster’s approach to her role. She wants executives responsible for overseeing disparate pieces of residents’ experiences with the state to see her as a collaborator and said that the creation of the role “signals to state agencies that they have a ‘seat at the table’ in the Governor’s Office for their customer experience needs.” These state agencies are able to have detailed constituent service conversations as a result of the long-standing awareness outreach that the Human Centered Design team (explored later in this Spotlight) has been conducting across New York State. 

As an example of the CXO’s role of delivering user experience insights, Webster described her approach to an initiative exploring social and emotional roadblocks for WIC applicants. Her goal was to move the WIC program’s guiding lens beyond maximizing administrative efficiency for the program. 

“It’s easy to be overly focused on moving around the pieces of the internal process to streamline program delivery. When looking at the experience of New York’s WIC applicants, we recognized that application questions needed to be softened. We needed to ask things differently, so people didn’t feel bad about being on the program.

“How do we make people feel? Do they feel good when they walk out of one of our offices, or do they feel degraded? If we focus only on getting them in and out faster, but they feel like they’re down and out, we’re not focusing on all of the right things”

Tonya Webster
Chief Customer Experience Officer, New York State Executive Chamber

As part of this exercise, the NYS Digital Team—the state’s in-house website experts—also undertook an initiative to improve the experience of the WIC website to more closely align it with user needs. They looked at website analytics and search traffic data available to determine the most common drivers of traffic to the website, then rewrote sections of the website in plain language and reorganized the layout to ensure that WIC clients could more easily find the answers to their most common questions. 

The state also launched a live chat tool on the site which they hope will not only provide a valuable service to WIC clients, but will also yield valuable real-time feedback and insights about areas of the program that could be improved. In the next phase of this project, the WIC program will prioritize implementation of those improvements based on the collected feedback.

An IT-housed HCD team focused on relationships

One key partner for Webster and her team is the Human Centered Design (HCD) team embedded in ITS. Since 2015, ITS’ HCD team has liaised with agencies looking to digitize their work, functioning as an in-house digital service team. The team sits within the Office of Digital Transformation, which reports to the state’s chief information officer. 

This is a relatively atypical model for injecting HCD expertise into government service delivery. While not ubiquitous, it is more common to see a standalone digital service team with HCD expertise housed outside a government’s IT shop. The affordance of NY’s model, however, is that the HCD team can capitalize on the existing cross-functional roles, relationships, and responsibilities of the state’s enterprise-wide IT shop. 

Regardless of the organizational model, a strong HCD team can bridge the gap between what administrators and constituents need and expect when it comes to benefits and services. NY’s HCD team aims to do so with a focus on relationships. Luke Charde, who heads up the HCD team as the director of digital experience, aims for the team to be well-connected across state government. Quoting J. Krishnamurti, he shared that “‘the understanding of relationships is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action.’” 

To illustrate his point, Charde described usability testing with NY state residents to uncover issues with the descriptions of state-administered services on the main NY.gov website. Working with the team that manages NY.gov content strategy, they created task scenarios and observed residents while they attempted to use the website. Insights from the usability tests showed that the categorical “tags” that were intended to help users were actually confusing. Users mistakenly interacted with the tags thinking it would lead to next steps for the service, rather than to service categories.

The exercise underscored for the team how people can sometimes stumble over their efforts to help. Simplicity, plain language, and clear next steps are the building blocks of website usability. Where the lens of web analytics showed which specific interface elements were getting traffic, usability testing indicated why and helped the NY team understand where interactions may actually be task detours.

That location of tag display was subsequently removed across all services in order to give clarity to users of next actions for each service.  Calculated across hundreds of service pages, small changes like this can have significant impact on user journeys. Specifically for unemployment services, critical “make sure you have” information was added in a later iteration to enable journey success.

Before:

After:

Further Iteration Based on User Needs:

Bringing consistency across the hundreds of government agency online services remains a central focus of the HCD team. The team’s credibility and consistent record of delivery garnered attention and investment from the Governor’s Office.

According to Charde: “[The Governor’s Office] really invested in us in the 2023 State of the State address. It wasn’t grand plans—they just made clear: ‘We have not resourced human-centered design sufficiently in the past.’ It took accountability for the experience that New York State residents have with government. There were no grand promises of ‘we are going to fix this today.’ Instead, they said ‘we are going to hire the right people on the right teams to make meaningful change over time.’ Now, the funding is there, and that’s what we’re doing.” 

The HCD team now offers up its services to state agencies as an in-house HCD consultancy using a chargeback model. “Each billable hour charged by the HCD team is a token of an agency’s trust, which creates incentives for the team to do their best possible work,” Charde said.

The CXO-HCD-state agency triad

The CXO’s office, the HCD team, and stakeholder agencies form a symbiotic triangle to support resident-centered digital transformation. The CXO’s office seeks out key user insights using surveys, operational data, and on-the-ground methods like engaging with the public to ask them about their experiences.  Armed with this data, the HCD team collaborates with responsible agencies to design, build, test, and iterate new solutions. 

Paley is looking forward to the expansion of initiatives and cultural changes that emerged as the triad has taken shape. “We have made significant investments in our HCD team and capabilities, and given ITS’ unique role as the technology services provider for the entire state, that team is able to be embedded in a wide range of agency projects from the earliest stages of the planning process, which is critical. But I’ve also been trying to think holistically beyond individual projects,” Paley remarked. “How do we really advance an entire culture and an agenda that focuses on improving the way that New York State government delivers services?”

“We’re only one year into the CXO role’s existence. We’re in the early stages. But it’s been really encouraging to see Tonya drive cultural change, and to see the HCD team delivering alongside her.”

Gabe Paley
Assistant Secretary for Technology, New York State Executive Chamber

Lessons learned

Investment in customer experience from the executive branch signals strongly to agencies that residents’ experiences with government are a priority. CXO roles can work to bring about direct impacts to improve service delivery, but the creation of a role can also demonstrate to agencies that they have support to invest in resident-experience initiatives on their own. This signal can elevate potential projects that may have otherwise flown under the radar or not received adequate investment. In other words, investing in a CXO role can have a “rising tides lift all boats” effect.

Embedding digital and design skills into the government’s existing internal processes can be a recipe for deep and long-lasting shifts. The growth of the HCD team in New York, coupled with the central role of the state’s IT agency in delivering technology projects, has allowed that team to expand its scope and become more embedded in the standard way that NYS builds digital services. Perhaps more importantly, its placement has enabled the HCD team to build relationships with public servants at all levels of ITS’ client agencies, driving a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the value of design thinking across the state.

Understanding relationships is a productive framework for advancing effective human-centered design in government. Governments are large organizations with sprawling digital lives. Holistic efforts to expand as well as ensure quality, consistency, and equity across government digital portfolios is no small task. Spending time keenly unpacking how agencies relate internally, and how residents make connections between agencies as outsiders to the enterprise, is a worthy investment for government HCD teams. It positions these teams to streamline residents’ experiences with government, and to make back-end operational shifts that can move the needle toward deeper digital transformation of government.

Resources and examples

To see how this work was put into practice, explore the following assets in the Digital Government Hub: