Throughout our recent series of blogs, we’ve outlined the new parking landscape for numerous sectors including airports, municipalities, and higher education, including the new opportunities and strategies available to create a more convenient and pleasant parking experience for the unique customer base for each of these organizations. Parking operators face a unique challenge since they serve multiple user groups under one umbrella. Operators support colleges and universities, airports, municipal customers, as well as others including healthcare institutions, residential, office, and much more.
Like many others, operators have faced numerous challenges over the past year. Yet, there are many opportunities, as well as new strategies and solutions available to emerge toward this “new normal” with the tools and resources to create a pleasant customer journey, as well as generate revenues. Further, there is an opportunity to attract and market to a new crowd of customers who previously public transit, but for the foreseeable future may feel more comfortable driving in their own cars. Operators have an opportunity here to target and attract this new population through creative marketing and advertising efforts, integration of touchless parking solutions, and more.
Many operators were already leading the way in integrating touchless parking solutions, but the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated this transition. Touchless Parking solutions offer a completely seamless parking experience, enabling the user to perform all the necessary tasks from arrival, to parking, payment, and through departure all through their mobile device. Moving forward, patrons will likely be more attracted to parking facilities that meet their needs in this area.
Another aspect of the parking operator experience is that marketing has become a much more sophisticated situation. Operators can utilize customer analytics to understand customer behavior, and customer segmentation, and develop marketing campaigns to meet these individual needs. Innovative promotional campaign solutions allow operators to tailor and launch targeted promotions rapidly, provide comprehensive campaign analytics, and gain a greater ROI.
Parking operators often allocate the inventory of their parking spaces to the aggregators, to resell via their mobile app. Aggregators offer special rates and bring in parking customers besides the operator’s typical daily or monthly customers. However, one way for operators to regain control over their parking assets is through Inventory Management. Operators can get real-time control of how much inventory they want to sell, through which channel, at what time, and at what price. With these solutions, operators gain better negotiating power, as well as make the channel sales flow more dynamic, thus making the relationship more profitable for themselves and the channel partners
Finally, monthly parking may look a little different moving forward as people gradually return to the workplace in varying degrees. Monthly parkers are the most loyal and profitable base, and it is important to effectively support them. It’s important to create the most convenient experience possible for them by allowing them to set up automatic payments, purchase monthly permits online, utilize a “get my car” feature, and more.
ParkEngage works with parking operators to provide them with the tools and resources to effectively serve their wide range of customers. Contact us to schedule a demo and learn how we can help you enhance your operation, and enable you to provide personalized, quality service to your users.
