The most efficient parking management process according to us

There are many different ways to manage your parking spaces. Many use a manual management process with administrators managing agreements, parking permits, customer contact and queue lists - on paper and with various digital tools. It is a work process that has worked well for a long time. But there are many parts of that process that could be streamlined.

Do you want to monitor and increase your customer satisfaction? Check out our templates!

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You are experts in your management

Where are your greatest thieves of time? Some of our clients get a real “wow” feeling when they digitize the appointment process and see how they can overview the queue, keep it automatically updated, and get customers to add themselves. For others, the goosebumps after inventory come when they've discovered new assets, or when they're picking out statistics and seeing how they can optimize their parking offer.

“It is very important to build right from the beginning in order to have an effective management process.”

— Josefina Viira, Head of Implementation and Customer Success

After all, what we are talking about here is a system tool. It is designed to support the process that best suits your business — whether you are a property owner, manager, operator or municipality. And although we think that digitized parking management is magical, of course the system is not magic in itself, but it becomes magical when it is used in the most optimal way for your particular business. Therefore, in order to make the management process as efficient as possible, it is important to start with you first. Who knows your business better than you?

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6 Ways to Streamline Your Parking Management

Changing a parking management system is a bit like changing your home — it's worth investing some time in going through what you have, to avoid moving around with trash or buying a mop you don't need. So the most important thing to remember in order to have an effective work process is that think first and then do.

1 - Inventory comes first

From time to time we are asked if you can not start by loading your existing agreements and places into the system, in order to get started a little faster. However, this is not something we recommend. By starting with an inventory of your parking assets, it will be easier to identify and fix deficiencies and inaccuracies that you may not have known you had. You do not want to be dragged into double contracts in the same parking lot, unnecessary vacancies, zero contracts or uneven pricing. Do this:

1. Go out to the parking area. Measure and draw the surface so that you have a good overview of everything you want to know when building your parking offer. How many seats do you have? How big are they? Where are the pillars and other obstacles? And so on...
2. Input the locations into the system (think strategically! see tip 2) and also include things like cargo spaces and other areas that are not used for parking — these you put in as “non-rentable spaces” to get a full overview of your assets.
3. After that, you enter your existing contracts and document the locations in the system. Then you will see at once the actual vacancy rate you have, and the system will warn you if you try to enter several contracts in the same place.

2 - Be structured and consistent

“Reserved” or “rented”? By thinking through your structure and being consistent in choosing color codes and designations for your space classes, it will be easy for your existing and future administrators to manage your parking. The time it takes to overlook the addition of a seat for an administrator who manages a variety of facilities is significantly reduced by such a simple thing as making a place class look the same everywhere.

Another nice consequence of this is that it becomes very easy to extract statistics and data. For example, you can see trends and developments within a location class across several different facilities, because you name the place class the same everywhere.

The time it takes to overlook the appointment of a seat for an administrator who manages a variety of facilities is significantly reduced!

3 - Document your processes

In Park46 there is an information tab where you can enter all the plant-specific information that may be useful for your administrators to know. This feature is valuable, as it can help you save hundreds of hours on, for example, training new staff. We recommend that you set up a standard template for what information should be included and reuse it in all facilities. For example, such a template may contain:

• Facility Information
• Rules
• Current/Temporary Changes
• Guarding
• Rental
• Error reporting
• Charging locations
• Security
• Cleaning routines

This makes it easy for your administrators to find the information they need.

4 - All information, a simple search away

Imagine a parking attendant calling your support with a question about why they have received a p-bot. Where do you start looking for the answer? A very convenient advantage of a digital system is that it becomes super easy to find information. With just a few taps you can find out everything you need to know about a contract holder, agreement, parking space, parking permit, invoice, registration number, company name, organization number or anything else. In the example of the p-bot, it will now be easy for you to see that the customer had activated their parking permit for the wrong registration number, which they can then fix themselves, directly in the app.

You can reduce administration to a single click, or even automate the placement completely.

5 - Let your customers manage their parking commitments

Do you love to manually tap in your parking customers' expressions of interest? Have you ever misspelled an email address? Wouldn't it be smart if your parking customers could manage this on their own? When you digitize your parking management, they can do just that. And then once they're in, they can manage everything around their parking commitments in the app. This means (as you probably already guessed) both your processing time and the risk of misspellings, etc., are reduced. Which in turn leads to reduced stress and happier customers.

6 - Automate access control

If you are renting out residential parking or need to ensure that applicants have the right to rent a parking space, you know how time-consuming it can be. With a digital system, you can simplify this process. Either by having the system perform an automatic strike against the population register, or provide new tenants with access codes that they use when expressing interest in a parking space. In this way, you can reduce administration to a single click, or even automate the addition completely.

With satisfied customers, your parking business will flourish!

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The most effective management process

As you probably understand, there is no “one size fits all” process, but the most effective management process is the one that minimizes your time thieves and allows you to focus on what makes your parking customers happy. That's the core of the poodle, isn't it? With satisfied customers, your parking business will flourish! So if you do not have completely satisfied parking customers today, we recommend that you start there.

We have developed a material that goes through How to monitor and increase customer satisfaction, and a couple of templates that you can start using today. Check it out here: