We’ve talked a lot recently about how the new “digital” landscape of the parking and mobility industry will play a role in how we move forward. This will impact every aspect of the parking business, from the customer experience to back-end operations. But how we continue to support and serve customers will take priority.

When it comes to customer facing parking processes, digital and mobility go hand in hand. Everything physical that the customer interacts with today, from finding and booking parking, to entering the garage, paying for parking, and exiting, is bound to eventually give way. Some of these physical things listed below have already, or may soon, disappear from garages.

• Printed coupons and promocodes
• Printed reservation confirmations
• Paper parking tickets
• Valet claim tickets
• Hang tags, RFID tags
• Validation stamps
• Loyalty cards,
• Parking Meters
• Pay on foot machines
• Cash and plastic credit card payments
• Printed signboards, rate card boards, garage availability signage
• Ticket machines and Gates
• Attendants, cashiers, and valets

Once the garage transforms everything physical to everything digital, it will significantly enhance the parking experience at every point of the customer journey from entry to exit and beyond. It will also help to significantly reduce the cost of operations.

Touchless self-parking and Touchless valet parking both create a more seamless and pleasant arrival experience, allowing the customer to focus on their ultimate destination with the parking process being just a quick and easy stop along the way. It also helps to reduce wait times during entry and exit.  

Touchless permit and Touchless monthly parking allows operators to provide even more personalized service for their most loyal customer base. Once again, this digital transition allows patrons to accomplish nearly every task of their permit parking management through their mobile device from purchase of the permit to payment, auto-renewal, vehicle registration, and more.

Even the act of finding a parking facility and space is enhanced by the digital parking experience. External wayfinding solutions provide patrons with real-time parking availability information to help them find a parking facility near their destination, as well as make online reservations prior to their arrival. Similarly, vehicle guidance systems (or internal wayfinding solutions) deliver the driver directly to an available parking space within the garage or lot.

The digital takeover of the parking industry has been felt for years, with recent world events sparking further development. The customer journey has never been more seamless, and we will continue to see these solutions become more mainstream, with patrons looking for these conveniences when they are making their parking decisions.

ParkEngage offers a complete suite of digital products over a powerful digital platform. Check out ParkEngage Touchless Self-Parking, Touchless Valet, Online Reservations, and Permit Parking for more on how you can completely transform your customer experience from the physical interactions listed above, to a full digital experience.

Over the years, how software is used by businesses has radically changed. Gone are the days when businesses spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the software packages, and then another hundreds of thousands to implement them as well as costly ongoing maintenance. Only to realize within couple of years their software has become obsolete. Compounding the problem now is the rapid digitalization of various functions of the business, along with the rapidly changing business models to stay competitive and meet their customers’ changing expectations. In this digital world, making costly capital investments to own software makes no prudent business sense anymore.

Using software as a service, or “SaaS”, makes businesses more agile. It shifts the responsibility to the software service provider to keep their software up-to-date to meet the evolving needs of the business. But the success of these SaaS solutions depends on how closely they track the specific industry needs. Are they built ground up keeping the specific industry vertical in mind? Do they help digitalize the specific industry business processes? Further, how seamlessly they work together?

The cloud-based software SaaS has become particularly popular in the parking industry. Parking asset owners from universities to municipalities to private operators and everyone in between now need an extensive array of parking technologies. Each organization has its own unique needs, goals, and requirements for serving their patrons. An excellent way to do this is through a SaaS platform built ground up, for the parking industry, that allows them to identify the solutions they need, and incorporate them into one platform.

Parking vertical SaaS solutions offer a number of benefits that are particularly useful in today’s environment:

• Fitting hand in glove with the needs of the parking industry end-to-end operations.
• Ability to pick and choose and customize the solutions that are right for the operations and meet the unique needs of the customers they serve.
• Reduced costs due to minimal hardware needs such as cameras, equipment, and hardware, as well as software installation expenses common in previous technologies.
• Flexibility to implement solutions on a “pay as you go” with no long-term commitments.
• Scale up and down as business needs changes due to seasonality or other factors.
• Simple to understand and easy to use technologies, allowing parking staff to implement tasks and obtain and evaluate data to make the best decisions for the operation.
• Minimal maintenance required due to cloud-based platform with regular updates and fixes when needed.

ParkEngage implements innovative parking vertical SaaS solutions through a parking industry platform. With a number of years of parking industry experience, we have built parking solutions to digitalize virtually every aspect of the parking operation. We work with our clients to identify the technologies that work best for their end-to-end parking operation. In the next few blogs we would talk about the blueprint for digitalization of various processes involved in parking operations.

Check out our entire suite of solutions and contact us to set up a demo or a free trial!