How do you enhance parking without impacting a visitor experience?

You want the people visiting your site, whether that’s a hospital for an appointment, a university to study, or a retail or leisure location to enjoy themselves and relax, to come away with a positive experience.

Every step of their journey affects that feeling.

Parking can sometimes feel like a free-for-all, which, if you don’t take control properly, can leave customers with the wrong impression when they arrive or try to leave.

This can undo all the hard work you’ve put into the rest of your business to make a great impression. So how do you regain control of your parking without it becoming another barrier to the right experience?

How do you enhance parking without impacting a visitor experience

Common visitor experience issues

The majority of customer and visitor experience issues, the ones that cause complaints and impact perception, are tied to frustrations with how things operate.

For car parks, this boils down to three key areas:

Services not aligning with needs
Congestion
Space misuse making parking harder than it needs to be

Solving these issues and easing frustration doesn’t need to be complicated.

1. Making your car park work for your visitors

How well do you know and understand your customers? Their ways of paying for purchases, and how they interact with your services? If the rest of your business is making a shift towards increasingly digital ways of operating, shouldn’t your car park logically follow?

Taking the time to understand how your car park is being used lets you make informed decisions about how to improve it. That could be:

Adding new payment options – the days of just using cash to pay for parking are long gone, sites need to utilise multiple ways to pay, from card and contactless payments to apps, and other digital services. This gives visitors more choice and the ability to adapt how they manage their stay to suit them.

Introducing EV charging – as the number of EV vehicles on the road increases, it’s important to make sure people have places to recharge. This can increase the amount of time someone spends on site, which is more time shopping, browsing and utilising your services.

Using permits to support staff parking helps you manage where staff park and control on-site parking, which is key to avoiding creating conditions that generate unnecessary congestion.

Find out how we can support your site

2. Easing congestion

Congestion in a car park isn’t just a traffic jam. Queues and being made to wait to get on and off-site create a level of frustration that can do serious damage to your visitor experience and as a result your reputation and your business. It also creates complaints that staff have to deal with instead of focusing on their actual roles.

Instead of having to explain why there’s traffic or dealing with an ageing paid parking solution that needs modernising, your staff should be providing the support and service your visitors and customers need.

Having multiple ways to pay for parking stops queues around kiosks and tablets. Then, through rules such as maximum stays, you can improve space turnover and availability.

Improving the amount of space available in a car park reduces congestion by removing circling. This is when someone drives around a car park trying to find somewhere to park. If multiple people are doing this, especially when a car park is busy, it can grind a site to a halt.

One of the main causes of circling is people trying to find specific spaces, especially when they have additional requirements when it comes to parking. Solving their issues requires a more specialised approach.

3. Combating space misuse

The easiest way for someone’s experience to be ruined is if they can’t park where they need to. Priority spaces exist to make life easier for people with kids, driving EV vehicles or dealing with disabilities.

When those spaces are taken up, especially by people who shouldn’t be parking in them, the frustration is instant. It makes getting around harder, increases risk, and in some instances can cut a trip short before it even starts.

Bay Management solves this. By placing ANPR at specific points on your car park, our patented monitoring bollard protects those spaces and ensures the people who need them are able to park where they need to.

Implementing changes

Knowing the tools is only part of solving the issues in a car park. Implementing them and communicating the changes to your site are crucial.

Signage updates and posters are important, but leveraging social media and your external comms is important to let frequent and potential visitors know about changes to a site so they can arrive armed with the right information.

Replacing frustration with confusion doesn’t help anyone. Launching a new service or solution needs to be communicated properly and supported while it beds in. That can help customers to adapt to changes without them becoming a cause of complaints.

The right support for your car park

Taking control of your car park needs the right partner. At Parkingeye, we’ve spent over 20 years helping businesses transform their parking. We work with thousands of businesses from every sector, taking the time to understand what each car park needs in order to thrive.

We can empower your parking, helping you take back control and improve your visitor experience. To find out more, get in touch.