Shoulder to Shoulder: Building Agile Processes in Government Teams

Supporting clients who use public benefits requires a dedication to innovation, ensuring that the experience of applying and keeping benefits is as easy as possible. At Code for America, we’re dedicated to helping government teams build capacity for sparking change. That’s why our Safety Net Innovation Lab was thrilled to recently partner with New Mexico on improving peoples’ experiences with their integrated public benefits platform. 

The New Mexico Health Care Authority (NMHCA), formerly the New Mexico Department of Human Services, oversees seven public benefit programs, including SNAP and Medicaid. Through their integrated public benefits portal, YesNM, New Mexicans can apply for, renew, and receive updates on their enrollment for these programs. Paired with the Consolidated Customer Service Center (CCSC), which provides a one-stop-shop for New Mexicans seeking help with all benefits administered by the HCA, New Mexico is a leader in helping clients access and manage their critical benefits. With a population increasingly using digital channels to connect with the agency, New Mexico aims to leverage these technologies for client support, such as live chat and chatbot solutions. 

The goal of our work together was to maximize the utility of existing tools within their client support ecosystem for analyzing client data, surfacing common complaints, and using that feedback to  continuously improve their clients’ experience.

Creating more welcoming doors

Necessity has consistently positioned New Mexico at the forefront of innovation. With over half of the population utilizing public benefits, the NMHCA believes that innovation is not only critical to serving their clients effectively but also to fostering the overall prosperity of the state. 

With the public health emergency unwinding, New Mexico sought additional ways to manage the influx of calls and other client support requests as people had to renew their benefits for the first time in several years.

When applying for benefits, a “welcoming door” is any tool clients can use to receive effective help in their case. Having multiple welcoming doors, like phone support and live chat, provides clients with more ways to access available programs while also supporting caseworker workloads.

Before our collaboration, New Mexican clients could only seek assistance through live chat from non-merit staff (who can provide general information and application guidance about public benefits but can’t process or make changes for a client’s individual case like caseworkers can). We identified live chat as a tool that could be better used to help clients get quick assistance from caseworkers while also providing rich qualitative data the state could use to make additional experience improvements. Additionally, this presented a new way for merit and non-merit staff to collaborate to support clients.

A more welcoming front door needs in-house expertise

One of the best ways to make lasting change is to start small. Doing so allows us to quickly test assumptions and make iterative changes that enhance the experience for everyone, both in the immediate and long term. 

Together, we worked to implement a six-week pilot to which allowed non-merit staff to escalate specific eligibility-related tasks to caseworkers, including but not limited to the following topics: case closures, adding/removing household members to a case, changes to utility expenses, requests for benefit award letters, Low Income Home Energy Assistance applications, and Medicaid renewals. While non-merit staff continued to provide excellent client support, answering a range of questions, they now also had the capability to send clients who needed help with case-related changes to a caseworker almost instantly, rather than having to redirect them to wait on the phone. 

Any project’s success depends on having the right people at the table from the beginning. In addition to caseworkers, we leaned on departments for the subject matter expertise, including Workforce Management, the Customer Innovation team, the Income Support Division, the Office of the Secretary, as well as their vendor Accenture’s technical and operational teams. This working group was responsible for the planning, launch, and evaluation of the pilot, as well as rapidly deploying solutions as we evaluated data about the evolving client and caseworker experience. 

We also relied on our expertise with live chat from other Code for America projects to identify quick wins and changes based on best practices from the field. Besides the new functionality with caseworkers, we collaborated to prioritize the following changes:

• Standardized responses with Salesforce QuickText: We worked with NMHCA’s Workforce Management and Income Support teams to create templated responses in Salesforce for caseworkers to use throughout the pilot. This allowed for caseworkers to respond efficiently and accurately, while leaving room for customization of responses.
• Updated tagging: Only certain topics were escalated to caseworkers, so we partnered with their working group to create updated conversation category flags for caseworkers to match the topics covered in the pilot.
• Salesforce feedback field: We created a new field in Salesforce for caseworkers to add notes about positive, negative, or neutral experiences from each client interaction, allowing our team to elevate key learnings and identify patterns from client interactions. 

Maximizing live chat as a client feedback tool

To center the client experience throughout the pilot, we needed to analyze client data regularly and hear directly from frontline workers staffing the pilot. From there, we could identify themes and make quick changes. We used data in the following ways:

• Analyzing live chat transcript data: Our qualitative researcher analyzed live chat transcripts to identify bright spots, pain points, and client themes daily throughout the pilot. 
• Twice-weekly meetings with pilot caseworkers: We routinely checked in about what worked, what didn’t work, and what needed to improve. These meetings gave the caseworkers the opportunity to share their feedback in an open environment. 
• Communicating via Microsoft Teams: Pilot staff, managers, and other members of the working group communicated in a new shared Teams instance about stumbling blocks and questions that came up.
• Pre- and post-pilot interviews with staff: We made sure caseworkers had the space to share how the pilot impacted their workflows and morale. 

We shared data updates at the end of each week with our working group and then prioritized changes based on a few variables, including projected impact on staff, projected impact on clients, technical resources needed to make the change, and time required to implement. The team worked swiftly to prioritize over 10 changes to the live chat experience in just six weeks. These changes often focused on simplifying and clarifying the process clients go through when reaching out for assistance. In one example, we changed the greeting to clients when they were connected with a caseworker, so clients understood they had been escalated to someone who could assist with more specific inquiries related to their case. 

New channels of communication bring more visibility to client issues 

This partnership had unanticipated benefits beyond the scope of our pilot work. The NMHCA has become more active in seeking partnerships with external organizations, and this cross-team collaboration has brought an immediate impact. Staff from different divisions who had previously not interacted with one another were now shoulder to shoulder learning, iterating, and communicating. NMHCA has always been an innovator, and this work has energized their shift towards an increasingly agile mindset, a direct result of our partnership.

NMHCA is continuing to use live chat data to make improvements for clients. For example, during the live chat pilot, we found that the top two reasons clients reached out were that they needed assistance with a case closure, or they were seeking a copy of their public benefits award letter. Members of the working group are now collaborating with their vendor to find ways to automate case closures for clients. They also found a way for non-merit staff to issue award letters. Both these changes are getting clients what they need more quickly and saving caseworker time. 

This partnership built upon the innovative, data-driven foundation of NMHCA and the CCSC. This mindset—one where data informs changes and small pilots spark immediate and long term improvements—is essential as NMHCA sets an example for other agencies they collaborate with. They now head a multi-agency Data Governance Council, with the explicit goal of expanding this kind of agile approach across the state.

What’s next for New Mexico

There’s much to look forward to at the NMHCA. Not only have they integrated multiple divisions from their partner agencies within the state to better consolidate collaboration, they are on the cusp launching of a new unified portal that will bring a cutting edge customer experience to the people of New Mexico. Integrating lessons from our partnership, they are looking to incorporate a live chat working group into the larger agency strategic plan, with the ultimate goal of being the guiding light for data-driven work within the state.