Tech Review: Touchless Parking Solutions To Help Businesses Adapt To Todays Reality
As the world continues to adapt to a rapidly changing environment, day-to-day parking interactions will need to be reimagined to minimize contact while still optimizing visitor and staff journeys through parking facilities. In a not-too-distant past, these capital infrastructure investments were wishlist items, but in a safety-focussed reality, these nice-to-haves are becoming critical in the success and growth of facilities everywhere.
Investing in the right technology to adapt to various environments is more important now than ever. End-to-end touchless solutions like Precise ParkLink’s rethink customer interactions from the ground up.
Touch-free transition
With businesses adapting and restarting coast-to-coast, working with the today’s technology will help ease with transition to meet the health and safety requirements. This includes minimizing physical touchpoint by using auto-dispensed entry tickets—handled through a software upgrade integrated with your existing gated parking technology—and will dispense a ticket when a vehicle is detected removing the requirement of pressing a button.
To take it a step further, through a hardware upgrade, EasyWave™ will integrate into your existing gated parking infrastructure and allow customers to wave their hand to dispense a ticket. These solutions will help prevent the spread of viruses and increase health and safety confidence and compliance.
For frequent visitors or monthly users, hands-free permits expand on the technology available to enter and exit without having to touch buttons. Pairing can be done using long- and short-range readers from Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI), HID, and mobile permits, making administration and maintenance easy, while continuing to offer customers incentives to purchase from a range of offerings from monthly permits, prepaid permits, and parking reservations.
Staying ahead of the curve
As we’ve discussed in a previous article, optimizing connected technologies will not only create a seamless experience, but future-proof your operations. Licence plate recognition (or LPR) builds and integrates with touchless parking solutions, allowing technology to uniquely identify a customer upon entry. This establishes a customer profile to track the session time to calculate the appropriate payment to be collected upon exit using a secure, contactless pay station positioned at the barrier, including support for Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Leading a truly mobile-first experience is ParkedIn™, a cloud-based mobile app that allows customers all the tools they need to manage their parking experience from pre-arrival and parking, mobile payments, reservations and validations. This is a game-changer when it comes to putting the power back into the user’s hands and being able to manage needs remotely, even when they’re off the parking premises.
Safety-first support
Safety is a necessary consideration for not only customers, but parking attendants and facilities staff. Two-way video and voice communication can be added as a hardware upgrade, giving customers the ability to safely get customer assistance while giving facilities the ability to centralize 24/7 support off-site and across multiple locations.
Adapting to today’s reality
Be part of the solution and help everyone adapt to today’s reality. It’s crucial to spread the message and help control the spread of COVID-19. With a Social Distancing Signage Package, easily implement floor markers, decals, and signage for use in entryways, stairwells, elevators, and around parking gates to remind customers of the new touchless parking technology.
Final thoughts
These considerations, software and hardware upgrades are critical to the health and safety environment moving forward, while positioning your operations for success and compliance. Leveraging the ability to connect multiple technologies to underscore today’s priorities will build customer confidence, while helping you spread the message through digital marketing channels.
Coupled with updated protocols, hours of operation, rates, touchless options and more, safe parking solutions can help alleviate pain points as our economy continues to restart and business determine how to adapt their day-to-day operations.
Winston Sih
Technology Journalist