Our top three tips for systematically improving your parking experience

Before we dive into the tips, we want to clarify what we mean by parking experience. Namely, how your tenants and parking customers experience the parking. Everything from contracts to payment and access to the parking lot. In other words, the whole experience of parking with you! Good, then we've sorted it out. Now let's run the tips list!

‍

First tip: Use personas and customer journeys to find opportunities for improvement

If you don't already know what a persona is, here's a quick explanation: A fictional character representing one of your audience segments. For example, “Eleine, the owner of the electric car”. A persona makes it easier for you to understand the needs, behaviors and motivations of your tenants and customers.

Once you've defined one or more personas, you can map customer journeys based on different situations your persona faces. For example, the character “Eleine, the owner of the electric car”, finds herself in the situation “She is in a hurry to a meeting and has to get there with her car”. A customer journey consists of all the steps a persona goes through from start to finish in the current situation.

With the help of personas and situations, you can identify your weaknesses and strengths. We have made two examples that you can use as inspiration and template for your own customer journeys.

Electric car owner Elene who is in a hurry to her appointment

As Elaine's video meeting drags out on time, she gets in a hurry to get to the next one. She locks the apartment and hurries down the stairs to the garage located across the street. She looks through the bag for the key card to the garage but has forgotten it upstairs in the apartment. She is allowed to call support and give her name and registration number to be admitted. Once inside, her new electric car has stood on charge overnight and is now ready for use. She just got the electric car and has not yet really understood how the payment for the electric car charge goes. But she assumes an invoice will pop up at some point. She unplugs the charge and gets in the car. She gets to call the support again and ask them to open the gate to get out.

Reflections on Eleine's customer journey

In the customer journey there are some points that could have improved Elaine's parking experience. Instead of a physical key card, it could have been a digital system where the port can be opened directly with a smartphone. The fact that Elene did not really understand how to pay for the electric car charge could have been avoided by offering park drivers an app for parking and charging. Where all statistics, administration and information are available. Since Elene had only used the electric car charger a few times (something that can be seen in the user statistics in a digital system), the support team could send a message and check that everything works well with the electric car charger. Then the support could have had a proactive approach instead of a reactive one as in the customer journey.

Newcomer Nils who wants to queue for a car park

Nils has just moved into his new apartment. All the furniture is in place, the electricity is on and the internet subscription is over. The only practical thing missing is a parking space for the car. It hasn't been done yet, Nils has pulled out a bit on it. But now he's calling the landlord to register his interest in a parking space. The request is received by a nice administrator who says that the queue time usually lasts about 6 months. Nils asks if there are more easily accessible places near the lift, but is told that it is not possible to rent specific seats. But when there becomes a seat vacant, he will get home a letter with an agreement to sign. He hangs up and feels a little insecure. Will it really take 6 months? Longer or shorter? How to keep track of the queue time? Maybe have to call once a month to check?

Reflections on Nils customer journey

Here, there are many things to do to improve the parking experience. Getting in a queue by calling, emailing, or filling out a form is common. But the lack of flexibility and feedback creates an insecurity on the part of the tenant. If the queue management had been automated, Nils would have been able to get direct feedback on the queue location and expected queue time. Regarding Nils request for a place near the elevator, it could be solved if the parking spaces had been indexed in a digital system. There are still a lot of agreements sent by mail. But contract signing can just as easily be done digitally using BankID.

If Nils had been allowed to go to a website and choose the type of parking space that suited him best, while receiving information about the expected queue time and price picture. Yes, then the experience would have been different. Imagine how good it would have been if the agreement could also be signed digitally with BankID? In other words, there is great potential for improvement in something as common as queuing for a car park.

‍

Tip number two: Measure customer satisfaction specifically for parking services

Customer satisfaction is measured in a variety of respects and in different business areas. But if you really want to improve the parking experience, you need to have information about what is good and what could work better.

In the simplest of forms, you send out a survey at regular intervals to take the pace of customer satisfaction (here you will find some templates that we have developed for this purpose). We recommend that you focus on measuring the NPS, net promoter score. In our experience, it tends to be quite low in terms of parking experience. By the way, did you know that NPS tends to increase when digitizing parking management?

If you want even more feedback, you can divide the questions into several smaller parts and send them out to the tenants on an ongoing basis when relevant. Then you can use different types of channels depending on which you have available. For example, SMS, email and push notifications.

‍

Tip number three: Simplify, simplify, simplify

The last, but perhaps sharpest, tip we have to share is to constantly try to simplify. The trick to success is to make it part of your internal culture. That everyone internally is constantly trying to simplify as much as possible for the tenants and customers. Question your customer journeys, evaluate statistics from customer surveys and test your parking experience for yourself. Do you really need a physical parking permit? Would it be possible to implement visitor parking that is entirely camera-based? Would it make it easier for tenants if all costs came on the same bill? Or if they could pay by card? Once you have managed to create a work culture that promotes simplification, the parking experience will improve.

Do you know what is a pleasant effect of a good parking experience? Your tenants and customers like you, they want to stay for a long time and are willing to test your new services. For example, electric car charging. They will also be more positive about change because they know that you will guide them through the change. Want to know more about how to communicate change? Read our blog post about it here: