Understanding the breadth of car park management Managing a car park takes a lot of time and effort. It’s an important capital asset for a business and requires ongoing attention and nurturing to deliver on its potential. Explore more With many moving parts and issues to consider, having the right help and support can make managing a parking site significantly easier. You might assume that you need to enlist multiple partners to help your parking flourish. However, the parking industry has evolved over the years, and businesses with one specialised service have diversified and given way to larger suites of services that bring everything a business needs to manage their parking and improve their customer service under one roof. This means that the systems in place have become multipurpose, in this blog we’re explaining some of the benefits of utilising them. Improve site usage At their core, car park management systems are designed to make life in a car park easier. This can be accomplished in several ways depending on what a car park needs. You might think that for car park management companies this is all achieved through enforcement, but that isn’t necessarily the case. ANPR helps track users on a site and enforce rules, it also improves the throughput of a car park and the flow of traffic. It also enables other services, like pre-booking, which allows a business to entice more visitors to a site to generate new customers. There are other changes to a site that can have a huge impact too, tweaking a layout can make getting on and off a site more efficient, reducing congestion and improving accessibility. This all helps to make a site safer and easier to use which is great if you are aiming at your site getting Park Mark status. The areas that need improvement will differ from one site to the next, and many car parks will require a mixture of services to achieve the right results. The parking industry has had to change with companies now offering an extensive range of services in one place. This makes it easier for businesses to find solutions to manage their parking estate, without managing multiple suppliers. Better user experience One supplier can now stamp out poor parking behaviours on your site while helping you to provide new services such as auto-pay, digital permits, or more modern, contactless, payment options to boost revenues and payment compliance. This all adds to a greatly improved user experience. By making payments on your site more convenient, and improving the flow of traffic, you’re actively taking steps to reduce the frustrations many visitors to a car park have. The benefit to this is you reduce the complaints and daily problems that the staff on-site have to deal with, whilst creating a more positive brand experience to boot! Lift revenues It’s easy to think that parking management companies boost revenues purely through providing additional payment options on your site. As we’ve mentioned, the services companies provide are multi-faceted and many of them can have a direct impact on your bottom line. Pre-booking draws users looking for a parking space to your site, however, if they then convert into customers for your business that’s two instances of revenue improving. Making it easier for motorists to pay and making it so more motorists can use a car park can see huge lifts to your revenues, both in the car park and for your business. The changes made on your site all work hand in hand to make your car park a more effective way of generating revenue. We’ve seen sites introduce new solutions and turn their unrealised potential into £10k+ in additional parking revenues! Boost efficiency Managing a car park is time-consuming, facilities teams are often stretched, with multiple responsibilities and tasks to complete throughout the day. Parking management systems help make their lives easier through automation, freeing up time and easing administrative headaches. Doing this makes a car park work more efficiently but has an added benefit of giving those facilities teams the time and bandwidth to support an organisation in other ways. For example, you might have attendants in a car park, stretched to breaking point dealing with problematic outdated barriers, payment machines, space abuse and congestion. These common problems give them little time to help visitors who need additional help and support or deal with other issues across a site. Parking management can automate barriers, provide additional payment options, reduce congestion, and drive down abuse. Removing those issues suddenly gives your internal teams that extra time they needed to provide ongoing support to those who need it. Drive down abuse Poor parking behaviours can be detrimental to any car park and the businesses attached to it. Unauthorised use restricts access and prevents potential customers from making use of services, often causing parking to spill into the surrounding area, creating issues for residents, other businesses and traffic congestion. This all combines to damage the perception of a brand. Effective parking management systems don’t just drive down the abuse on a site. They streamline the flow of traffic through it. This increased throughput means more customers, greater footfall, reduced community tensions, and higher revenue, while still providing an efficient parking experience. Provide insight Utilising parking management systems, especially those driven by ANPR cameras, can go much further than providing initial improvements to a site. The data gained from a car park can provide a level of performance analysis and behavioural insight that can transform the way you look at your car park and inform future planning and investment. It’s vital that you understand your customers and how your site is being used. This information comes in several forms. Revenue data lets you know which payment channels are popular and if it is worthwhile adding additional options. Visitor and capacity data help you see peaks and troughs in activity – this can be a great indication of when to adjust staffing levels to deal with more customers. Fuel analysis enables you to track the vehicles using your site based on their fuel type. With more electric vehicles on the roads, this lets you see how many park on your site and identify the best time to invest in additional infrastructure to support greener motoring. And that’s only a flavour of what’s possible. Parkingeye alone capture over 4m data points a day – you’d be surprised at what it can tell you. More to parking management than meets the eye There’s a wealth of additional supportive services that you might not know fall under the remit of parking management companies. Lining, lighting, groundworks, general maintenance, landscaping, even helping with building regulations and asbestos reporting, these can all be accessed through parking management companies, either directly or via their selected partners. Many companies will have a network of partners in place, meaning you can access everything your site needs in one place, without the admin headache of finding multiple service providers. How can we help you transform your parking? The services you offer to visitors can vary and improve the performance of a site in several ways. However, those services are always going to be much more effective when they work together. A single supplier – particularly one where products are interoperable – can work with you to find the solutions that will have the biggest impact on your site, not just in terms of combating abuse but also in improving the efficiency of your day-to-day operations. Finding a parking management supplier who’s in a position to offer everything in one place can reduce admin for your team, boost performance on your site, provide a holistic data picture and create a parking experience that has a more positive impact on your visitors. If you would like to find out more about our services, please head over to our car park management page for more information, and get in touch with us today! Find out more Take a look at more blogs How does ANPR work, and how does it benefit your car park? Automatic Number Plate Recognition, or ANPR has been a mainstay of car park management for several years, but it does... 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