GOAL
Reduce wait time at a driver licensing service center. The ambitious target was to serve 90% of customers within 15 minutes of check-in.
CLIENT OVERVIEW
The driver licensing program provides testing and identity document issuance services for the public.
OPPORTUNITY
The average appointment wait time at the service center exceeded one hour in May 2023. Long wait times inconvenience customers and disrupt their day. Additionally, 12% of transactions could not be completed due to missing or insufficient documentation from customers.
RISKS
– Continued long wait times and negative customer experiences.
– Supervisors’ duties being interrupted to direct traffic around the office and manually monitor customer queues.
– Needing to add resources to meet public demand.
BENEFITS
– Shorter and more reliable wait times for applicants.
– Supervisors spending more time on staff coaching, mentoring, and process approvals.
– Serving more customers at higher quality using existing resources.
CORE PROBLEM
Examiners’ ability to complete transactions was constrained by customer queue management practices and by insufficient documentation from customers.
The legacy appointment system scheduled 10-minute windows for each appointment, even though transactions often took less time — and sometimes more. This created significant idle time across counters, whose capacity is the constraint of the system. Examiners could manually pull in another transaction, but doing so jeopardized the timeliness of other appointments in their queue. Appointments were also scheduled to individual counters rather than a central office queue, causing some counters to fall behind while others were underutilized. The result was that examiners and supervisors spent time manually adjusting and managing queues instead of focusing on completing transactions.
DIRECTION OF THE SOLUTION
Improve examiner capacity by centrally managing customer queues and improving the documentation customers bring to the counter. Schedule appointments into a centralized queue and send customers to counters when examiners complete their last transaction and are ready for the next customer, eliminating idle time caused by assigning fixed appointment windows to individual counters.
STRATEGIES
– Work with the queue management vendor to make the needed changes to the appointment scheduling and queue management system.
– Implement a “full-kit” documentation check when customers enter the office to help them gather the documents needed to complete their transaction.
OBSTACLES
– Resource shortage: The division is organizationally flat, and limited capacity to work on the project due to daily responsibilities caused delays.
– Technical issues: The team worked with the vendor through several rounds of testing and two pilot phases. The time required to properly test the new calendar functionality — at minimum one month per round — extended the timeline significantly.
PROJECT TIMELINE
– 09/06/2023: Project Start Workshop
– 12/01/2023: Started user acceptance testing for new queue management solution
– 03/19/2024: Started pilot
– 05/03/2024: Identified and developed solutions for technical issues
– 08/16/2024: Pilot complete
– 08/19/2024: Started expanding pilot solutions to the next office
IMPACT
– At the pilot service center, the culture has shifted significantly. Examiners are working well with the system updates, supervisors are freed up to perform their core duties instead of directing traffic, and there is a perceivable increase in walk-in processing capacity.
– The percentage of customers served within 15 minutes improved by 10.5% from February to April 2024.
– The project exceeded its goal by serving 93.2% of customers within 15 minutes during April 2024 — a 15% improvement over April 2023.
– Technical issues impacted pilot results in recent months. These issues have been resolved, and the program has decided to move forward with implementing these changes at the next service center.
