A Customer Experience Officer (CXO) is a C-Suite level executive in charge of the overall customer experience of an organization's products and services. This is a job that's most often associated with the private sector, but different levels of government now have CXOs as well. Eric spoke with Ashley Laymon, the CXO at the Maryland Department of Information Technology, to learn more about her experiences in this role.

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Eric Egan: Hi everyone and welcome to Citizen Digital, an ITIF web series where I speak with experts in the United States and around the world to explore how digital technology can improve citizen and customer experience. My name is Eric Egan. I'm the Policy Fellow for digital government at ITIF. And with me today is Ashley Laymon, chief experience officer for Maryland's Department of Information Technology. Ashley, thanks for joining today.

Ashley Laymon: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Eric Egan: So I thought before we jump into a broader conversation with some of the questions I have, maybe just share a little bit about yourself, kind of your background and how you found yourself in the role of CXO at Maryland.

Ashley Laymon: Sure. Actually, I sort of lucked into it in general. My undergrad's actually in elementary education, and I graduated a time where there was a surplus of teachers. Lucky me. So I took a job with a really small boutique software firm in Indianapolis, Indiana who had just won their biggest contract with the state of Indiana. And I started doing software training and I really just fell in love with technology, the people aspect of how to connect people with technology. And so just over the years I worked my way through various roles that weren't necessarily coding roles, because that wasn't my background, but project management, business analysis, account executive type roles throughout the years.

I ended up working for Xerox. I was recruited by them several years ago. That's how I ended up in Maryland. They had a large contract with the Department of Human Services here in Maryland. And I just have sort of found my home or my niche, if you will, in actually working with the people who use the technology as well as the people who provide the technology and really trying to be that bridge. And so this transition into the world of CXO, has I guess been an unexpected but logical one. So it's been a wild ride and a really fulfilling one over the past few years.

Eric Egan: Very cool. We have a shared background there as someone who also was a teacher just for a year and then found themselves in IT. It's certainly not technical either, but yeah, that's kind of interesting. Yeah, so I mean particularly given your title and your role, I was wondering if you could share what you think customer experience is from your point of view and how you think, in particular kind of digital technology plays a part of customer experience and keeping in mind that the customer can mean a lot of different things within government services. Yeah.

Ashley Laymon: Absolutely. Actually, I'll pull from some of my experience as a first grade teacher. One of the things you do when you're teaching first grade is you're teaching kids how to write and how to understand things when they read. And one of those concepts is that who, what, where, when, why, how, understanding that so that you can have comprehension, but also being clear when you write. And I kind of want to pull on that here because I think when you really want to define what customer experience is, you have to first start with defining who the customers are. And it can mean various things at different times. The Department of Information Technology at the state of Maryland, our direct customers are really the other agencies. We play a supporting role in the ecosystem of the state where we're providing IT solutions to those agencies so that they then can provide a good customer experience to the citizens of Maryland.

So the citizens in Maryland are effectively the department of IT's customer's customer. I would also consider though that DOIT has internal customers. So, there's various operational teams, cyber security, you have all your normal administrative functions that need IT as well, like HR and finance. And so even internal to our own agency, we need to listen to those stakeholders as well. So first, defining who your customers are, because you can't really provide solutions until you understand the universe that you're trying to address.

But then next, even before you get to the experience, I think that you've got to also talk about, well, for those individual customers, what are the missions and objectives and the pain points that they're experiencing in on their day-to-day tactical implementation of their own services? And then finally, then once you understand who your customers are, what they're trying to do, then let's talk about, well, how is what they're trying to do going? And as far as how the digital technology space, digital services in government, I think you can really talk about, "Well, okay, so now I have my customers, what technologies are available to them already and what technologies do they feel are accessible?" Which is, I think a concept that gets lost sometimes. When you're talking about other agencies that have missions that are not necessarily IT, they view IT as just something that it's just got to work. I don't care how it works, I just want to turn on my computer and it's perfect and all of that. But so you really have to think about meeting them where they are. And just because there is a technology that's available, is it actually accessible to your customer? Can they use it? Does it make sense? Is it easy?

The other thing is, if there isn't technology that's available that's going to meet their needs, where are the gaps and does it make sense to make or buy, right? Are there products out in the marketplace that would make more sense for government to actually buy than to build custom? And that's not always an easy decision. There's a lot of factors that go into that decision making.

And then I think finally you're talking about even if, so now we know what technologies are available, we know how they're going to use it, but then what's going to be the benefit? And does the benefit outweigh some of the costs or even the procedural and organizational change impacts that are going to affect those agencies? If it's going to take six months to roll out a new technology and it's going to take a lot of people's time, is that worth, is the actual benefit that they're going to see? Does it make that time and money investment? Does it make sense? So I think that what it means, you're connecting technology with people, but you also have to make sure you're connecting the right technology for people.

Eric Egan: Yeah, it's really interesting. It's kind of like an evolution of the traditional back office IT department where it was just kind of reactive and hidden and people would go to them if something bad happened to a computer or their software was buggy. But it's kind of applying these more human-centered thoughtfulness around how you serve internal customers. Even as, and as you said, there's a step away from what we would consider residents or the people who actually use program services and whatnot.

But it's interesting too, it's kind of leads to my next question, which is, and maybe this has changed, so you add maybe some perspective of what you thought the CXO role would be for you. Maybe it was something else. You may be aware that it's a role that's gaining traction across governments, different levels as well, state, local, federal. So I'm curious if you could share maybe what you thought it would be like, but also thinking about your day-to-day, maybe even in comparison to some other CXOs who might be a more traditionally focused on a citizen customer and comparing that, or is that something that you... Or maybe another way to phrase it too is do you think CXOs could exist within, as you operate within the IT? Do you think a CXO could exist kind of a counterpart in a program delivery on another agency that's focused on program delivery where it's like you have two CXOs working together? This was a long and windy question, but part of it's just kind of, what's your day-to-day as a CXO and how has that kind of changed or evolved? Yeah.

Ashley Laymon: So when I was recruited by the Department of IT to build this, and it didn't start out as a customer experience office, it was really, "Hey, we're a service provider and we provide services to over a hundred units of state government." And there's problems. II is mechanical things break your customers. They know that they need something, but they don't exactly know what they need. You have to have that human interaction to actually talk to the customers and figure out what they need. And so the idea was let's bring in a group of people who have a technology background, but also have experience in actually working with customers. This is not the back IT staff that doesn't want to talk to anybody. They just leave me alone and let me code. These are people that really want to have conversations all day. Always when people ask me how do I recruit for people? I'm like, "Well, first thing, you got to have the gift of gab." Because all I do is sit on the phone all day.

So that was the original idea. And then what happened, I mean it really organically evolved and it was really pretty exciting that nobody knew since it was such a new concept, nobody really understood at the state, okay, so you're telling me I can call the department of IT and I have a dedicated person that every time I call them, I can talk to the same person. So I don't actually have to re-explain what my problem is. When you call a service desk, you might get whoever, whoever picked up the phone that day. But I have this person almost like an account executive in the private sector, that I can talk to who understands my agency, and I can help get problem solved, I can get new services, I can change existing services, I can maybe strategize on a new IT project that I want.

And it was a brand new concept and it took off like wildfire. I mean the email volume that we were getting, the phone calls that we were getting, it was unmanageable and we had no real way to triage all of these requests because there were only a few of us. And then there's this big IT organization in the backend. So the first thing we really had to do, which really started really laid the foundation of the customer experience office proper, was we developed an intake process. So even though these, and we actually called them portfolio officers, but it's kind of a unique term to Maryland, but these account executives, we would talk to these agencies and then we would run around and go try to figure out where inside our operations we needed to go to get them help. Instead, we was like, "All right, let's use our tools, let's get Service Now, but any ticketing platform would work here, but let's get these requests documented and then let's have a meeting with the entire executive team and let's look at all of these requests." Which did a lot for our agency because first of all, it allowed our executive team to understand the demand and the trends that were coming in, where we never saw that before.

It was just one agency asking for something and you really weren't able to track that. Okay, well agency X asked for the same thing that agency Y asked for six months ago, and then now agency Zs asked for it again. I mean, maybe we need a statewide solution for this because there's obviously a large demand. Same thing with escalations. Before, if they were just isolated, "Oh, we're having a problem with our VOIT platform." Well, if you start seeing the... And you're starting to track through this ticketing mechanism, you're starting to see, okay, we've had 20 problems with our VOIT platform in the last month. There's some sort of issue there. So that organic growth and I guess collaboration that brought not just the customers complaining or they want things and really brought that into operations and had them actually have some ownership in front of the executive team, I think is what really elevated the importance of having the voice of the customer be heard on a wider scale.

So from there and having this intake process and this weekly meeting with the executive team, and when I say the executive team, our secretary attends this meeting, it is a big deal. Everybody knows it happens on Tuesdays, our customers know it happens on Tuesdays. So that's really what started the idea of needing a full office with a support staff to really manage this and make it better and make it bigger.

So as far as my day-to-day, like I have a team of these portfolio officers under me, and they are absolutely amazing at developing the relationships. They have a set portfolio of agencies, so while they have many agencies that they handle, the agency themselves only sees it as, that's my portfolio officer. I always call Eric or I always call Sally or whatever. And my role as the CXO has really been, evolved more into not managing the day-to-day requests from the agencies, but instead thinking about, okay, what's the next phase of this team? How can we provide even better service? How can we provide better communication and inform our agencies about the new innovations that our department is getting ready to implement, but also figuring out how to work with our operational teams and being that voice of the customer so that we can influence what actually is being built and the changes to our services to better meet the needs of our customers. So I don't know if I answered all of the parts of your question, at least 50% of them.

Eric Egan: That was good. I'll kind of circle back cause to the first part of my question, 'cause I think I was jumping ahead a little bit, but one thing you mentioned that I'm curious, so you mentioned these regular Tuesday meetings and really the whole executive team being there, and as there's a lot more of I think C-suite types of roles as people get a little more thoughtful tactical around how to focus on the things, operational things that need to be done within the department. And a lot of these, if you're thinking about chief data officers, chief technical officers, chief security officers, chief experience officers, those all arguably can fall under IT and maybe report to a CIO, but that's not always necessarily the setup. I'm curious is in kind of a twofold question, circling back to I think where I was going earlier, which is, how do you... Within IT, within the IT department, how do you manage those relationships with other executives? How do you manage your own priorities and understand the department's overall mission, but then taking another level higher, how do you manage that interaction across with the secretary, but then across other departments? Is there a lot of cooks in the kitchen or is it something that people kind of understand their lane but also know how to collaborate? Just any kind of insight or thoughts on them?

Ashley Laymon: I will say that when this concept was introduced, these people that were coming in now and sort of poking around operations and now all of a sudden we're like, "Well, the agencies are upset, so we need to know what's going on." It was not overly well received within operations at the beginning. Nobody wanted to open the kimono and it took a long time to build that trust between... It's our customers loved it, the internal teams that do it really wanted us to mind our own business. And it took a long time, I would say probably at least six months before anybody really wanted to answer our phone calls. But what happened over time, and this is what I would give advice to anyone who is thinking about setting up a practice like this, it will take time, but what will happen if you let it evolve, what operations teams and even the executive team, because sometimes we're a little critical of what's going on.

As the voice of the customer, sometimes we have to deliver bad news and say, "Look, this stuff's not working and we need to fix it." But over time, what I think the teams realize is and start to rely upon is that we become proactive in preventing the really bad escalations. We are ingrained with our customers, we're hearing the feedback, and so we're starting to hear those rumblings, right, before they blow up and they fester and it becomes really unhappy faces. We're getting the emoji with just the straight across line face.

So that's one thing that I'm confident that you would talk to our operational leadership, the CTOs of the world, they're going to say, "You know what? The portfolio office, the CXO, they're helping us get in front of potential problems a lot better than we were able to do three and four years ago." I think the other aspect that is also we are able to provide guidance and strategic input about what services we should be providing, I think has also been very helpful to operations because we shouldn't be implementing technology for technology's sake. Even though there's a bleeding edge technology and everybody thinks it's really cool, if nobody actually wants it's not going to go very well. Right?

So having a group of people that can help with understanding the actual need and not just the thing we want people to want. One great example is during COVID, when everybody was sent home, it was really difficult, and I'm sure most other states, federal government all had similar challenges where not everybody had a laptop and not everybody had a state phone. So what do you do now that most of your workforce is at home and doesn't have the technology they need? So while we started solving those problems, ordering laptops and getting phones issued and all of those things, there's this idea that, well, we also need these online workspaces set up so that everybody in the state has all of their applications and all of their things like right there. And you can VPN in, and it'll be great.

But when the portfolio office at here at DUET actually started talking to other agencies, what we realized is there were a lot of people that really just need their email. And so it's not saying that the Google, or sorry, it's not saying that these online workspaces aren't a good idea and shouldn't be implemented, but having someone to actually talk to the customer base and saying, "Well, they don't probably have to be implemented in every single situation. We certainly don't need to require everybody to use them because that might be overkill." So things like that really do help our operational teams understand where they should be spending their time and spending their resources a lot better than just trying to work in a vacuum and guessing. So I think if I had to give any advice to anybody new, I would say just ride it out. Eventually the value becomes apparent. And I forget the second part of your question.

Eric Egan: Maybe I did too. While you were speaking... It'll come to me in a second, but it was funny because I was thinking of if there are any wins you wanted to highlight. And when you were talking about COVID, I mean immediately I was thinking about, I as a consultant was working within a state IT department as well. And one of the challenges was getting... Because even consultants, you have to use obviously state laptops to do a lot of the work for security reasons and whatnot. And one of the logistical challenges was just getting the laptops at all. The whole, the supply chain in delivery logistics and all those things were very complex. And something like a CXO office or somebody who was really thinking about how do we get our customers what we need would've been hugely valuable. And it seems like that was kind of a big win moment where it really demonstrates the value of this kind of office, this kind of position.

Ashley Laymon: And that was a unique problem because if there wouldn't have been this CXO layer, we could... Or the Department of IT could have just sent out a survey and be like, "Everybody tell us how many laptops you need." And because of those supply chain issues, the number of laptops needed vastly outnumbered, the laptops available. And so one of the things like the CXO department had to do was actually go talk to the agencies and be like, "Who are you needing laptops for? Because we are going to have to triage this." Right? "What are you using them for? Are they supporting critical functions?" And in the middle of a pandemic where we're trying to get VPN up and all of this stuff, the technical teams do not have the time to do those... Have those conversations. So having someone be able to do that customer interface was paramount.

Eric Egan: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I halfway remembered the question I asked you and maybe was now, it was two questions ago. It was kind of around, maybe is a challenge, but I'll ask it anyway. So hitting on that, I'd mentioned earlier where it's like this concept of a CXO can really agnostically operate within any department or theoretically should, I mean most organizations including the government, but the private sector have some kind of customer, whether it's internal or external. So maybe this is a good final question too, as well as any advice. You mentioned a little bit in terms of advice, but if you were thinking about at a generic position in a CXO, what is really the mentality, not necessarily in an IT shop, it could be within program delivery. What are the things that are really across the board in this kind of role? I know we've hit on some, but we might have listeners and whatnot who are like, "Oh, well I'm not an IT. Is this CXO an IT role?" That kind of thing. So I guess what your thoughts or any tips or advice on?

Ashley Laymon: Yeah, I absolutely think that the customer experience office is not unique to IT. Obviously that's my background, but we're actually seeing in the state of Maryland, other agencies setting up and their own portfolio officers or CXOs, the Department of Health is doing it, the Department of Human Services. And so that's been really exciting because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So that's been really exciting. But as far as programmatically, I think I want to talk a little bit about our OneStop platform here at the state. And the reason I want to talk about it is because it's a digital service that the Department of IT has been implementing over the past several years. It's basically a platform where constituents, there's all the forms that you need to interact with the government. I need a hunting license, I got to fill out a form.

So those types of things that many of them have been paper based forever, we're now starting to digitize those and putting them up on one website called the OneStop website, or OneStop. And so that way for the actual constituents of Maryland, when they need to interact with these agencies, they're not having to go figure out where it is on the website or call them or send out a paper form. My point being is that that's a digital service, that's a technology. But in order for that to be successful, you've got to have people that understand at these other agencies the services that they are providing to their customers, which are for the most part, citizens of Maryland. And understanding, well, what are the pain points? And a lot of the pain points in working with government is having to call somebody or having to go to an actual office to do something like nobody wants to do that for.

I am not that young and even I do not want to, I don't want to go to a store anymore. If I can order online, it doesn't exist. So I think from it, that's a technology example that applies to I think every program because people don't want to do things in person, but conceptually, any agency that's delivering any mission to a customer base, they need to start thinking about, how can I make this easier, whether it's with technology or not? And I do also, I guess maybe my final point is even though I'm a technologist and I absolutely believe in automation where automation makes sense, part of that customer experience off office role also needs to be talking about what doesn't need to be automated. Automating everything is not the answer because I do... And I'm the customer experience office that do it is a prime example. Sometimes people do want to talk to a human. How many times have you called your bank's IVR, and they want to take you through this thing? I mean, I don't know about you, but me, I'm like zero, zero, zero.

Eric Egan: That's right.

Ashley Laymon: I just want to talk to that person. So I think having that human interaction and just having a friendly voice to talk to is really a lot of what the customer experience office should be doing. Just listening.

Eric Egan: Yeah, no, that's a really good ending. I think especially because you kind of hit on what my own thoughts around service design and it really being more about that which applies to IT. It also applies to if you're thinking about a physical office and how you organize that appropriately and it's becoming more and more, I think human-centered design, right? You can use that it's not just for technology, it's really just being thoughtful around the customer experience and designing services that facilitate and support those customers. And it sounds like you're doing that within... From an IT point of view, but like we said, it's really applicable across the board.

So somehow we are already out of time with that really flew by. But thank you again, Ashley, for joining us. This was a great conversation. And for those watching, please stay tuned for more of these episodes of Citizen Digital.