Oregon DMV has roughly the same number of employees that we did twenty-five years ago. And in that same time period, the population of Oregon grew by over eight hundred thousand people. The capacity in our field offices gets overrun really quickly, and it results in long wait times. The goal of this was to reduce the number of customers that had to come to our field offices. What we wanted to do was allow our technical experts in the field offices to focus and dedicate their time on transactions that are more complicated, that take more time, that really somebody can only do in a field office. So we wanted to pull those customers away from the field office and allow our folks to be able to really concentrate on providing that service on those more complicated transactions.
With the kiosk, it has resolved some of the workload issues. It plays as another employee. It allows for a service to be completed outside of the DMV itself, which then removes that transaction from the DMV employees. So even though we may have one employee down or a vacancy, we have that kiosk that allows for transactions, and there are specific transactions, to be completed. But here’s the beauty behind it, is that, again, they’re not restricted to the DMV operation hours. You can do this on a weekend. It even gives more of a flexibility there that DMV could not offer.
The addition of kiosks for our customers has really helped solve some accessibility issues, whether it’s time and you’re not able to come to a DMV office during the hours of eight and five, you now have the option to do these simple transactions and get your inventory that you’re looking for outside of business hours, whether that’s in the evenings or on the weekends. 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.
To help prevent theft, the stickers have the license plate printed on them. We don’t have that capability in the DMV offices. So it’s amazing that the license plate is right there on the stickers so I can put them on my car and I feel like they’re safe. That really reduces the odds of someone stealing the stickers off my car because they’re customized for me.
Having the opportunity to be able to have something that just simplifies the process I think is a reason for even myself to take advantage of this opportunity.
From a long-term strategy, we hope that this will become a real avenue for folks to use and that gives just more options and more accessibility down the line for both customers and it really does ease up the pressure on our staff that need to be working face-to-face with people.
The benefits are there’s no wait. There may be a person ahead of you, but five minutes in comparison to what it could be. There’s no concern about having something mailed to you in the future. You’ll get your receipt, you’ll get your tags, and you get your registration.
So it’s not something in the future that you’re looking for in the mail. This is just as though you were at DMV in front of an employee. You get all the same things just without the smile.
