In Case You Missed It: BI Webinar
Exploring the Power of Parking BI, Data & Analytics
9 min read
Business intelligence (BI), data, and analytics are powerful tools that your business needs to succeed—and the same holds true for your parking operations.
As a facility or property manager, it is critical to understand how you can leverage BI to explore valuable data insights to enhance your portfolio strategy and generate positive customer experiences.
We recently hosted an informative discussion on how BI can help develop a greater understanding of your business, including your parking operations. The panel included Maria Pallante, Executive Vice President of Client Operations at Bond Brand Loyalty, and Cynthia Bruce, Senior Proposal Writer at Precise ParkLink.
In case you missed our webinar on Exploring the Power of Parking BI, Data & Analytics, we've summarized the key discussion points.
The Power Behind BI
Data-driven decision-making is essential for all businesses, regardless of size or sector. As a result, BI is a requirement for any organization to understand their customers, monitor performance, identify areas of improvement, and control results by deploying solutions that have a set goal in mind.
When seeking BI tools suited to your business needs, it is vital to have a centralized, scalable, and intuitive reporting suite. The data and analytics collected from your BI platform should be tailored specifically to your needs with the flexibility to modify and expand in alignment with evolving business objectives.
A well-established BI tool that can work with multiple data sets from a central platform is vital to that data being analyzed and acted on promptly. It also helps considerably if the data is presented in a visual format that a user can ingest, understand, and confidently make decisions. Implementing a business intelligence platform is a simple but effective way for any organization to achieve growth, improve inefficiencies and maintain its bottom line.
Leveraging Parking BI
Now – more than ever – organizations of all sizes are gathering data to gain new insights into their customers and develop a greater overall understanding of their business. The parking and mobility industry is no different.
Parking is an industry that is rich in raw data, and the more intelligent the technology in place to support a parking operation, the deeper and broader the data set that becomes available to owners and managers.
Data and analytics are the backbones of any successful parking operation. If you do not have access to real-time parking data, implementing smart and connected technologies that generate data is where you should begin. Reports such as parking access, revenue control systems, license plate recognition, and parking guidance systems will provide you with the tools to fuel future growth.
As a starting point, here are a few ways you can gain access to data within your parking facility:
Invest in Connected Hardware Solutions such as:
• Pay Stations
• Parking Guidance Systems and Sensors
Set up Points where Customers can be Identified:
• Permit readers (barcode/BLE)
Identifying and Understanding Parking KPIs
Once you have access to data and analytics, the next step is to identify useful key performance indicators (KPIs). When identifying KPIs for your parking operation, it's essential to consider your bottom line or your "main goal." What are you trying to achieve for your business or your facility? Pinpointing your principal business objective is crucial in determining the KPIs you should be tracking.
After determining your bottom line, you will need to evaluate your customers’ behaviour. This can include everything about a customer, including their demographics, the type of car they drive, and the time of day and reason for their visit. Understanding your customers' behaviours will allow you to understand better who is using your parking facility and when helping you make well-informed decisions about your operation strategy.
Above all, you will want to examine the parking revenue generation of your facility. The amount of revenue coming in is a direct representation of the performance of your parking operations. Furthermore, it is also vital to be tracking your occupancy rates. Not only does this help you gauge how frequently your parking facility is being used, but it gives you direct insight into your parking occupancy trends. This, in turn, helps you deploy successful sales and marketing techniques such as dynamic pricing and last-mile services.
As consumer expectations continue to evolve, so will your operation. Real-time parking data and analytics are essential in identifying what is working and what may need to be changed to continue to meet your customers’ and your parking operation’s needs. Gaining an in-depth understanding of all areas of your operation will allow you to propose and implement changes to improve your parking operations, increase revenue, and make data-supported projections for future growth.
Taking your Parking Solutions to New Heights with Unlimited Possibilities
BI tools are evolving at a rapid pace. These tools connect data sets – often from multiple subsets – in one location to remove data friction. They're helping organizations visualize their most important metrics to gain significant insights. Property managers and owners prioritize this data analysis to empower business users with the intuition they need to improve their parking operations and revenue generation while eliminating inefficiencies.
Data analysis allows you to make period-over-period comparisons in all areas of your operation, including metrics like revenue, reservations, validations, payment types, occupancy rates, and customer types. Comparisons give you that moment-in-time view of how your operation is doing and are usually the first sign that something has changed or is out of alignment. It's also a good measure to see how modifications to your parking program are affecting your standards. Noticing critical differences while analyzing your data will be an early gauge of the level of success of changes, external influences, and the overall “health” of your parking operation.
After the fact, it is vital to streamline your on and offline strategy by connecting both data sets so you can understand how many people were referred to your site from a Google Ad, rather than relying on conversions and potential projections. This can be achieved by connecting data sets with technologies such as barcode readers or pin codes — for example, if you provide customers with a coupon code, pin code technology lets customers use that code.
Tracking KPIs also lets you introduce dynamic pricing structures– the number one proposition for all businesses. Businesses and parking operations have leveraged dynamic pricing strategies for years. The hospitality industry and organizations such as Uber are great examples of how companies can benefit from using dynamic pricing algorithms that automatically adjust rates at any given time based on variables such as time of day and supply and demand.
The first step to getting started with dynamic pricing is collecting parking occupancy data. This can be done with smart sensor technologies such as Park Assist that allow you to track and monitor real-time parking occupancy and set rates dependent upon occupancy targets allocated to that period. In addition to occupancy, sensor technologies often associated with parking guidance systems can help reduce traffic caused by drivers searching for parking by 37%; it can also be integrated with "find my car" functionalities, which can help you understand if there is room for improvement with your signage and wayfinding strategy.
When operating on a dynamic pricing structure, it is common for property managers to raise rates during peak times and lower rates during downtimes.
The Future of BI in Parking
People used to fuel technology. Today, it’s the other way around. Customers’ expectations are changing; they demand more advanced technology, more self-serve options, more choice, and more security. Because of this, owners and parking operators must adapt to newly emerging trends quickly.
But how is parking management staying on track with client and consumer expectations regarding technology? It's simple: One platform for everything parking.
What if technology could allow you to manage every aspect of your parking operation from one centralized hub? This is the inevitable future of parking management, a singular platform with everything you need to build a successful parking management strategy, including data visualization, real-time reporting, artificial intelligence, live central monitoring and remote control.
The Power of Loyalty Programs
Integrating your parking with an existing loyalty program effectively secures recurring revenue and connects visitor experiences. In most cases, this can be achieved with a simple hardware integration or upgrade such as Barcode and QR code scanners and geofencing. You can even build a loyalty program using license plate recognition.
Organizations should never underestimate the impact that creating a reputable and robust loyalty program can have on your customers and your business's overall success. Customers can make or break a business which is why customer loyalty is a powerful asset.
Creating meaningful engagements and acquiring loyalty for your brand begins with thoroughly understanding your customers and their behaviour. Collecting valuable data about the type of people that frequent your business or facility helps you make more informed decisions regarding your operations strategy. It is also critical in helping you build a loyalty program suited to your customer base.
But how can you ensure your loyalty program exceeds standards to secure your current customers while continuing to obtain new ones? This is where you need to delve into the mechanics of what makes a successful loyalty program by focusing on the key factors that influence consumers into placing their ongoing support into a brand.
There are seven key components that can help lead to long term brand engagement:
Access: Do you give me exclusive access? Do you make me feel special and recognize me?
Know Me: Do you know and remember me? Is the program experience tailored to my personal preferences?
Time: Do you save me time? Provide me with ease and convenience?
Learning: Do you enhance my experience by providing relevant information?
Financial: Do you save me money? Do you give me added value as I spend more?
Communications: Do you send me relevant communications that are worth my time?
Safety: Do you make me feel secure – both with my data and in physical interactions?
The next step in building a successful loyalty program is understanding what data you should be collecting and how you can leverage these data sets to create meaningful engagements and deepen relationships along the customer journey.
When collecting customer data, it is essential to be completely transparent about what data you are collecting, why you are collecting it, and what you will do to ensure the data stays secure. There must also always be a value exchange involved in the data collection process. Collected data help you obtain valuable insights about your customers, so ask yourself what you can offer them of value in return? Providing benefits behind your data collection will encourage customers to willingly share data with you and help personalize the customer journey and tailor your loyalty program to each consumer's specific needs.
If you couldn’t attend Precise ParkLink’s recent webinar discussing Exploring the Power of Parking BI, Data, & Analytics, not to worry! Watch the whole discussion below.