Arapahoe County Transforms its Operations with Qmatic

Committed to “Service First”

The Clerk and Recorder’s office is one of the busiest places in Arapahoe County, where its Motor Vehicle office is the highest-trafficked such office in the state of Colorado. Historically, the Clerk and Recorder’s Office has experienced long lines and waiting times, possibly as long as 45 minutes.

In their pursuit to meet their commitment to Service First and to ensure that customers were getting service fast and easy, the office decided to look for a vendor that could meet the challenges the County faced with a very crowded population inside their lobbies and with limited supply of data on their hands. “Arapahoe County had a different system that didn’t have the amount of data that we need to make sure that customers are helped quickly,” explained Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder Joan Lopez.

Transforms and streamlines its operations with Qmatic

After reaching out to Qmatic, the office was introduced to Qmatic’s queue management system and customer journey management platform. A solution that would enable the office to transform and streamline its operations and create a better staff and customer experience at every step of the customer journey, from pre-arrival to post-service.

After a thorough thought process, the Office decided on Qmatic as their chosen solution. “Qmatic had a long proven track record in the state of Colorado, in other states, and globally. And we needed data. Qmatic had a great analysis and data reporting feature, and was the only vendor that could integrate with DRIVES, the state’s digital interface system for county motor vehicle offices.” said Chief Deputy Director Karl Herrmann.

The office saw immediate effects of the implementation

Qmatic’s self-service kiosks and customer journey management solution was deployed at all locations and quickly revamped the service. “Rolling out Qmatic was very easy to implement, the software is easy to deal with, and it took literally 15 minutes for each employee to be trained,” said Clerk and Recorder Lopez.

Using Qmatic, the office was able to manage the entire customer journey while gathering real-time analytics. “They [Qmatic] allow us to manage our lobby, they help our managers, our team leads and our supervisors to navigate the throughput of our office and make sure that customers come in and go out happy and quickly,” stated Herrmann. After the deployment, average wait times at the Office were reduced by 75 percent.

Coronavirus significantly impacts operations

Two months after the implementation, the arrival of the global COVID-19 outbreak came into effect and significantly impacted operations, forcing Arapahoe County to close all its buildings and offices to the public in an effort to keep staff and customers safe.

Before the pandemic, the office was already looking into the possibility to deploy a scheduling solution that would allow customers to book appointments online to become more efficient and reduce the number of walk-in customers at its locations. As the Office reopened, staff faced a backlog of customers created by the shutdown and needed to find an efficient means to serve approximately 1,000 customers a day.

“After COVID-19 hit, we had the ability to do appointments for Motor Vehicle, which was not an option before we had Qmatic, so what we had to do was just to make sure that the appointments were available to the public and per office,” said Lopez.

By introducing appointments and messaging services – text and email reminders to the public – the Office was able to keep customers informed on what to bring, as well as the rules and regulations that customers needed to comply with before arriving at the in-person appointments.

Reduced lines and wait times while keeping staff and customers safe

“Qmatic played a pivotal role in our ability to reopen during this pandemic,” said Herrmann. “Qmatic really helped with changing our office, specifically, and most importantly with the social distancing aspect, by navigating our lines and by creating a structure that allows us a finite amount of people that come in. That reduced the potential for community spread and made our staff feel safe to come into work.”

Since the implementation of Qmatic’s Customer Journey Management platform, the Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder’s Office has been able to reduce their wait times significantly by being able to reallocate resources by looking at the collected data and insights. “The data allows you to see the peak times, what are the peak seasons, who are the peak users,” said Herrmann. “And that’s kind of data that allows us to drive our decision-making process to allocate resources appropriately so that we can move people quickly.”

Staff and customers have embraced the new system

The changes that have been made around the Office have not only provided great results in terms of reduced wait times and fewer people waiting, but both staff and customer satisfaction are now higher than ever before. “All of our customers are now way happier than they’ve been in the past, and our staff are happier,” stated Herrmann. After conducting a staff survey, the results showed a 90% satisfaction rate among staff on the changes that had been made and the customer satisfaction went from a 45% service satisfaction rate to a 90% satisfaction rate, 78% of which were extremely satisfied with the service.” Herrmann continued, “Qmatic provides a great benefit for our customers, it allows our customers to control their time, in the past they had to come in and take an entire day off because they didn’t know how long it would take.”

Moving forward amid Covid-19

“Bringing in Qmatic has really changed the game, especially in the pandemic we are in right now. People feel safe, employees feel safe, every department has benefitted from Qmatic, customers get in and out quickly and are informed on what they need.” Lopez said.