The waiting times for securing a driving test continue to stretch for miles with the average wait now a whopping 24 weeks.

Such delays are having a knock-on effect on the Driving & Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) with learners often phoning up its customer services with queries and requests.

Since the pandemic began, the rates of these calls have rocketed. For instance, the DVSA received 359,000 calls between October and December 2021, which represents an 82% increase over the same period in 2019.

Help out

While the DVSA has hired in 50 temporary call agents to answer 2,000 more calls a day, the agency is asking learners and instructors to help reduce the number of calls it receives by:

  • using its online services instead of phoning its customer services teams whenever possible. So if you’re a learner and want to change your driving test date, you should use the change your driving test appointment service here, instead of calling up.
  • using the fast-track number if you’re a driving instructor – 0300 200 1122 (option 25 at point of connection) – and to ring when the lines are quiet to help ensure your call is answered.
Top 5 call types

The DVSA has profiled the top five types of calls that take up the most time. These are:

  1. Theory test bookings (average call handling time of 9 mins, 30 secs)
  2. Driving instructor test swaps (7 mins)
  3. Prefer to phone (7 mins, 30 secs)
  4. Request to change a test date (7 mins, 30 secs)
  5. Enquiry for the DVLA, not the DVSA (oh dear).

While being asked to help out the DVSA is not ideal – and some of you may think that this really isn’t your problem as a tax payer – trying to help out the agency will hopefully have a positive result.

Those waiting times to talk to a DVSA call agent can be cut down – reducing your frustration – and in turn help ease the burden on the agency so it can focus on resolving the driving test issue, instead of overly focusing on call management and call agent procurement.

Know Your Code

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Main photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels