First impressions are key to any experience. They can have a significant impact on someone’s opinion of a person or place. Parking is the first (and the last) impression most people get when visiting a destination. It can quite literally determine whether or not they return.

Parkers today have extremely high expectations when it comes to their parking experience. Safety and security is of course their number one priority, both for themselves and their vehicle. The next priority is convenience. Given the significant increase in parking technologies presented to them today, many are looking for the opportunity to arrive and depart in the most efficient and quick manner possible. Touchless parking is the perfect solution to these expectations.

From self-park to valet operations, touchless parking technologies offer the convenience every customer wants. With these solutions, parkers can arrive, drop off their vehicle, pay, and depart the facility quickly, seamlessly, and touch free.

Parking should not be something people even have to think about. It should be that simple. They should be able to easily drop off their vehicle and go straight to their destination without long wait times, figuring out payment machines, or interacting with staff. Touchless parking solutions get people where they want to be as quickly as possible. They also help free up time and resources from parking staff, allowing them to focus on other efforts like safety, maintenance, and customer service. ParkEngage offers end-to-end touchless parking for both self and valet garages, comprehensive customer relationship management, mobile valet, permit parking, and parking inventory and multi-channel management. ParkEngage can integrate our solutions with any existing parking equipment or applications, or work with our clients to create custom applications that meet their unique needs. Check out the entire ParkEngage Suite of Solutions today!

This week we are concluding our blog series on the future technologies coming to a garage near you. In our final highlight, we are featuring smart devices and edge computing.

Our lives have become overrun by smart devices and they impact nearly every experience we have and every task we undertake each day. Smart phones are so ubiquitous now that expecting every parker would have one at all the times is no longer a stretch. They have become a necessity in life. They are the consumer’s primary window to the world for interacting with any kind of product or service, including parking. Smart devices now also come in the form of televisions, tablets, cars, and more.

Technically defined, a smart device is an electronic device capable of computation, interactively or autonomously, generally connected to other devices or networks via different wireless protocols, but often capable of functioning in offline mode as well. Further, edge computing refers to the distributed computing that brings computation and data storage closer to the sources of data typically on the smart devices such as smart phones or autonomous cars.

From the parking perspective, the opportunities these smart devices have provided already for the industry are endless. They do everything from aid the user in finding available parking, navigating to that location, entering and exiting a garage touchless and ticketless, paying for parking, calling for a valet, much more. Further, the operator uses them as an essential tool for tracking consumer data, recording vehicle information, and communicating vital information to their customers. With advancements in the connected car technologies, how a consumer interacts with parking services today manually via smartphone, will move over to the car’s smart devices and consoles, and cars would automatically interact with the parking services without the consumer’s manual intervention.

It has been such thrill to take you all on this journey to highlight the trending technologies that continue to infiltrate our lives and how they will impact parking in the coming years (probably sooner than later). Take a look back at this series and all of the technologies we have discussed:

• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML)
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Blockchain
• Cloud Computing

It’s important to make an effort to understand the complexities of these technologies, the impacts they will have on parking, and the opportunities that will present themselves as a result. ParkEngage continues to identify new and trending technologies and develop solutions to create the most convenient, cost-effective, and efficient parking experience for owners, operators, and customers.

Contact us to schedule a demo and start taking your operation digital now!