New York State DMV Improves Service And Cuts Costs With Multi-Channel Rightnow® Deployment
Goals
- Provide 24/7 web information self-service to the state’s citizens and businesses
- Reduce operating costs by reducing phone, email, and in-office workloads
- Optimize use of online transaction processing systems
Achievements
- 97% self-service success rate
- 75% decrease in email workloads
- Reduced phone calls and office visits
- Faster responses to customers requiring personal attention
- Consistent, accurate answers provided across all communication channels
Government agencies like the State of New York Department of Motor Vehicles (NYDMV) face difficult challenges. On one hand, they have to deliver essential services to large numbers of constituents and businesses at some reasonable level of responsiveness. On the other hand, they have strictly limited resources with which to do so.
These agencies therefore have to optimize the resource-efficiency with which they deliver their mandated services. They also have to be able to deliver these services across all communication channels—especially the web, which continues to grow as the channel-of-choice for many constituents.
Thanks to RightNow, NYDMV has done more than just meet these challenges. The agency has significantly exceeded its original efficiency goals and is now delivering superlative service via phone, email, and the web. In fact, NYDMV now answers 97 percent of knowledge base users’ questions automatically via web self-service—and, as a result, has reduced email workloads by 75 percent. Phone and in-office workloads have also been reduced.
“RightNow has enabled us to provide our web customers with outstanding ‘Help Yourself’ service that has yielded eye-opening results,” said New York State DMV internet customer relations manager George Filieau. “We’ve also found that the more you help your customers online, the more you wind up helping yourself.”
Making The Most Of The Online Channel
With its initial deployment, the DMV’s “Internet Office” quickly became busier than any of its bricks-and-mortar locations. In fact, by offering information customers needed and more than a dozen online transactions—including ordering custom plates, replacing drivers’ licenses, and renewing vehicle registrations—the agency’s site soon began handling about 19,000 visitors a day.
This online activity led to the agency receiving about 250 emails a day from site visitors with questions about DMV requirements and services. The email volume created a lot of work for NYDMV’s staff. It also often prevented site visitors from getting key information or completing their online transactions until they received answers to their questions—which could sometimes take more than 48 hours.
To address this problem, NYDMV decided to implement RightNow. Their initial goals were modest. If NYDMV could increase the percentage of customers who could find the information they needed online by 50 percent and reduce the volume of emails being generated by the website by 30 percent, the investment in RightNow would be worthwhile. The stated goals of improved service, reduced workloads, and elimination of the agency’s email backlog would have been achieved.
The results far exceeded expectations. In the first week of the RightNow deployment, 94 percent of customers were finding their answers online. Email volume immediately dropped 33.5 percent. With some adjustments to the agency’s self-service language, email volume dropped an additional 18 percent. A simple change in site navigation resulted in another 28.5 percent volume decrease.
Eventually, the agency achieved its current numbers of 97 percent self-service effectiveness and 75 percent email reduction. At the same time, use of its site has continued to grow. Today, the agency offers more than 30 different online transactions. Every day, approximately 3,500 to 4,000 website visitors take advantage of the knowledge base to find answers to their questions—and less than 65 feel the need to submit an email question to DMV agents.
“If we hadn’t implemented RightNow, I have no idea how we would ever be able to handle the kind of email volume we’d be generating,” Filieau says. “It’s simply an indispensable tool for a high-volume site like ours.”
Broad Impact On The “Constituent Experience”
RightNow’s impact extends well beyond high rates of immediate self-service and reduced email workloads. Self-service has also resulted in reductions in phone volume and visits to NYDMV’s bricks-and-mortar offices—although these are harder to quantify, because the agency can’t track them with the same degree of accuracy it can apply to email volume.
In addition to enabling the agency to serve more motorists at less cost, these volume reductions allow agency staff to devote more time to situations that truly require their personal attention. The simplest and most common questions—such as “How long will I have to wait for my duplicate license?” or “Can I schedule a road test for a Saturday?”—are now handled primarily online, while phone, email and “face” time can be more appropriately allocated to exceptions, emergencies, and complex problems.
NYDMV’s 130 agents can also refer to the agency’s knowledge base themselves to ensure that the answers they give are accurate and up-to-date. And because the same knowledge base is being used across all channels, the answers given to every motorist are always clear and consistent.
NYDMV initially seeded its knowledge base with about 130 question/answer pairs. When service reps answer a new customer question that they think would make a useful addition to that knowledge base, they generate a proposed answer with a click of the mouse. The agency’s knowledge base management team then reviews the proposed answers for accuracy and clarity. As a result of this process, the agency’s knowledge base now contains more than 290 answers, and it continues to grow in ways that directly reflect the real-world needs of its constituents.
Filieau adds that, in addition to providing NYDMV with great technology, RightNow has also provided the best practices expertise essential for such a successful enhancement of the constituent experience across all communication channels. For example, when it became clear that many visitors to the NYDMV site were bypassing self-service and going directly to email submission, RightNow showed the agency how it could direct those visitors to first make at least one attempt at using self-service.
“RightNow has been a great technology partner for NYDMV,” says Filieau. “As a result of this partnership, we are truly delivering the benefits of eGovernment to the people of New York State—even as we free up resources to address the new challenges our agency faces.”
NYDMV Support Site | NYDMV Homepage
About State of New York Department of Motor Vehicles
The State of New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (NYDMV) supports New York State’s 11 million motorists with a complete range of services including driver licensing and vehicle registration. The agency’s website is its busiest “office,” experiencing more than 160,000 page views per day, which includes nearly 6,000 online transactions every day.
Greg Gianforte