My son and I just had the experience that is uniquely the DMV -- a one hour, fifty minute long wait to renew our licenses, which took precisely 3 minutes.
Let’s start with the facility: There were three active stations (out of eleven total). Based on counting ceiling tiles, the room was 30’ wide by 88’ long. There are 40 gray chairs and eight green chairs. The chairs were filled, and there was a line that averaged 20 people long pretty much the entire time we were there. When we arrived, we were given ticket numbers A202 and A203, and a pictographic list of all the road signs in use in North Carolina. (The only requirements for license renewal is that you pass an eye exam, and can correctly identify 12 road signs, four of them by shape only.) An overhead sign said that the examiners were currently on ticket A170. I was worried that if I memorized all the signs too early, I’d forget them by the time my ticket was called.
We were told that we were to stand in line until a spot opened up in the gray chairs, and then we were required to take that seat. We could not sit in the green chairs. As we moved toward the front of the line, we noticed that there were also B-series and C-series tickets. So the simple assumption that we had only 32 people ahead of us was optimistic. My son got a seat in the front, and I got a seat in the back.
There were two video screens hanging from the ceiling at the front of the group of gray chairs, hanging directly over the green chairs, in fact. (The green chairs are where you went to sit after passing the test but before getting your picture made.) The video screens displayed an 11-minute long clip that had weather, local traffic maps, a message that drunk driving was bad, an ad for a law firm that specialized in license suspension and revocation cases, another ad for a firm that made duplicate keys, and an odd assortment of factoids, including that African elephants only have four teeth with which to chew their food, that the Sahara Desert is roughly the size of the continental US, or Europe, and that Eva Longoria and her husband went out to dinner on Monday night. The thing about elephant teeth was particularly intriguing, since there would presumably be two on each side, one top and one bottom, meaning that each tooth would have to be about the size of a cinder block.
We waited for forty minutes, wondering about elephant teeth, and also wondering why anyone would care whether or not Eva Longoria and her husband went out to dinner, texting back and forth as the numbers changed up on the overhead screen.
“Only 27 more to go”, I texted when A175 went up.
“Only?”, he texted back.
Suddenly, the lady who was tending the line and handing out tickets made an announcement. “The average wait time is 62 minutes. This is a first come, first serve department. The A tickets are the express tickets, and the B and C tickets will have to wait longer.”
Thank goodness the A-tickets were express. However, just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse, a baby started to scream. At least the air conditioning worked, and it struck me then: There is a huge opportunity for innovation here!
We waited one hour and fifty minutes to go through a three minute process. That isn’t efficient. How could this be improved? How about a kiosk that asked multiple choice questions, had a camera, and a credit card swipe? I could even conceive that this could be done at home, over the internet, if there weren’t concerns that people would get help with the test. (Not that giving you a sheet with all the answers on it while you waited indicated that they were really plumbing the depths of your knowledge with this test.)
I texted this to my son, who responded that if we sped this up, we would be depriving people of the soul-crushing “experience” we were having. Good point.
Anyway, I started a conversation with the fellow on my left, Kenneth, an older man who was passing the time reading the DMV handbook. I asked him if he thought that automation with a kiosk would be a good solution. He said yes, and there were probably a lot of ways to improve the overall situation as well. The lady on my other side said that she thought it would be a great idea to have an ATM nearby, especially since the DMV only takes cash and check. Vending machines would be a nice idea, and we thought video poker games would help pass the time, and both of these ideas would inevitably lead to more revenue for the state.
Not surprisingly, I am not the first person to think this way. Working on my Droid, I found a 2004 article by Lisa Kerner of kioskmarketplace.com identified many places that kiosk can be used for “line busting”, including the Nevada DMV:
The Nevada Department of Transportation uses kiosks for self-service license renewals, shortening wait time from one hour down to 15 minutes, reported Karla Guarino, marketing director for KIOSK InformationSystems. As in this example, a line-busting kiosk often serves as form, pen and clerk.
According to Guarino, lines at the Nevada DOT are reduced by as much as 30 percent, and have led to improved customer service. This can be attributed to the fact that while kiosks shorten lines, they also offer a consistent customer experience. A kiosk is never in a bad mood and, in retail environments, it doesn’t forget to suggest additional merchandise. Guarino added that kiosks often lead to significant increases in new product and promotional item sales.
While I’m not sure what sort of “new product and promotional items” are for sale at the Nevada DMV offices (perhaps “I ♥ the DMV” hats and T-shirts), the fact that the kiosks were successful is instructive. California and Connecticut are reportedly considering kiosks as well.
It costs $32 to renew a license, so I would think that the state would want to get as many $32 fees processed per hour (let’s call them “inventory turns”.) My count showed that there were 60 people waiting at any given point in my nearly two hours there, so there was about $2000 out there waiting to be collected. With 10 kiosks, the 60 people could have been done in 30 minutes total. If we assume that the 60 people arrived evenly over the two hours, then that is one person every two minutes. We'd only need about four kiosks to assure there should be no waiting under those circumstances.
Maybe we should just turn the whole thing into a drive through operation!
P.S. I shook hands with Kenneth after finishing up, and said, “I’ve enjoyed the time we spent together!” He laughed, and said something very interesting: “It is strange the kind of bond people form in situations like this!” I wonder if he thought that a session at the DMV was some sort of hostage situation!
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