I’m the field services manager for Oregon DMV. We have fifty-nine field offices spread throughout the state of Oregon, ranging in size from one employee in our smallest offices to a couple of dozen in our larger offices. And our administrator often says that we exist to serve Oregonians. And to that end, I work closely with our executive team and our region and office managers to most effectively and best support our employees and offer the best service to Oregonians.
Prior to this project, the only option for a customer to receive in-person services at DMV was to come into a field office between the hours of eight and five. So we wanted to expand that and we thought outside the box and we thought, “How can we bring these simple DMV transactions to the customer?”
We reached out to other states and we did research and ultimately, after a procurement process, we landed with Neumo. By establishing these self-service kiosks in grocery stores, what we’re trying to do is give people the opportunity to access these services outside of their otherwise busy day. By providing this additional service channel, our customers are able to receive the services and do their transaction in a time and place that’s more convenient for them. They can do it while they’re doing their grocery shopping, maybe eight o’clock at night, maybe on weekends, and that frees up their life and it also adds less disruption to their other obligations that they have.
What I ask the staff to do is that every time they get the opportunity, mention the kiosk. If they don’t have a transaction, they may have a family, they may have a friend, they may have a neighbor, it may be a coworker, it just might be someone asking for information. We say promote the kiosk. For one, it’s a win-win situation for us. If we can have customers utilizing some of these resources that don’t have them come into the office, then that’s one less transaction that has to be completed by a staff member. If we can say, “Hey, go to the kiosk, rather than come to DMV, you don’t have to make an appointment and you don’t have to wait in line.”
We also have an interactive map on our website. So go to the website and you can see where those locations are that we currently have self-service kiosks. There’s also a list there of which transactions you can perform at the kiosk. We’re also going to be updating that map frequently as we bring on more kiosks around the state.
Whether a customer puts their blue envelope in the mail or goes online to DMV2U and renews their vehicle registration that way, there’s still a human on the other end of that fulfilling that order, updating our system, and ultimately putting their plates and stickers in the mail, where if you go to a kiosk, that is all done in five minutes.
We want to provide more options for people to receive services. So specifically, we want people to go online. We want people to receive the services in the comfort of their own home. But we also want to provide people additional service channels like kiosks and other ways to get those services without having to go into a field office. So promoting our self-service kiosks, we hope will expand their use and be able to reach more people.
