How pain free parking translates into

Retail Parking White Paper

How pain free parking translates into greater profits

Vying for the consumer’s pound has never been tougher. Not just because of the continued growth in online shopping, but because shoppers have more choice and more ways to access the stores they wish to visit. This may be in a town or city centre high streets, dedicated destination stores (‘sheds’), out-of-town shopping centres or the vast array of multi-tenanted retail parks that now appear around the outskirts of virtually every town, city or urban environment. This evolution in availability and choice is just a response to the changing lifestyles of ‘time poor’ consumers, whose fragmented lives mean they have to snatch windows of opportunity wherever they can, so the value of convenience has risen exponentially.

Whether you’re a retailer, a commercial landowner or a retail asset management company, you still need to fight for that pound. To win that fight, every element of the consumer shopping experience has to be examined and optimised. With convenience being high on the decision-making criteria for where a consumer spends their hard earned time and money, retailers and operators are starting to invest in technology and solutions. This enables them to see beyond the silver strip to the wider shopping experience as they look for any insight that will give them the edge in the retail war.

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The car park facilities on site represent the first and last touchpoints of the shopping experience. Get that wrong and you risk dramatically tainting the whole experience

Regardless of whether you’re an individual retailer, a retail park or a shopping centre operator and whether you offer free parking or paid for parking, you want to maximise the number of consumers in your stores. And if you’re going to win that battle for convenience in consumer’s minds, the shopping experience you offer needs to be right…and in most cases where a physical location is involved, the shopping experience starts and ends with the journey to and from the store.

The reality here is that the approach to/from the area and the car park facilities on site represent the first and last touchpoints of the shopping experience. Get that wrong and you risk dramatically tainting the whole experience and with it, not only their attitude, actions and likely spend during their current shopping visit, but also endangering the likelihood, frequency, or duration of future return visits. A disillusioned customer rarely keeps their frustrations private, personally sharing it with their wider circle via social media, where bad news travels fast and further than ever before.

Conversely, get it right and not only will they keep coming back, the likelihood of the frequency of those return visits increasing, their average spends per visit also rises. A Harvard Business Review Study by Peter Kriss, published in August 2014 on “The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified” summarised it by saying that for consumers who have a poor experience with your organisation, there’s just about a 40% chance that they’ll be your customer in a year. On the flip side, there’s about a 75% chance that customers who are highly satisfied will stick with you for at least the next 12 months. Those highly satisfied customers will spend 140% more than those who have negative experiences.

Highly satisfied customers are also more likely to use the store more frequently. That increase in use results to more shopper time in-store and that directly correlates to more purchases and greater profits. This makes these shoppers incredibly valuable over their lifetime.

In contrast give customers a bad experience as they leave and they may just think twice when they next plan a shopping trip; often they will opt for the more convenient alternative because they know they can park easily. Indeed, research conducted by the ROI Team in 2012 in Ashbourne, Kent revealed that more than two thirds of shoppers’ choice of shopping destination is influenced by the car parking experience.

So why does parking matter?

Highly satisfied customers will spend 140% more than those who have negative experiences

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Even with established sites, there are many ways you can optimise the user experience

When looking at optimising the parking experience, naturally you will have greater freedom if you are starting with a blank sheet of paper on a new site (depending on planning restrictions). However, even with established sites, there are many ways you can optimise the user experience. The key elements of the parking experience include:

• Ease of parking: well-sized, clearly defined bays with good space between vehicles to enable easy access in and out of vehicles

• Simple layouts and navigation: uncomplicated, logical layouts which take the hassle out of searching for a space and make all available capacity readily available, with well-designed routes and ramps that give plenty of room to negotiate

• Ease of entry and exit: layouts that encourage a smooth flow of traffic and avoid queues at entry or exit

• Uncompromised personal safety: well-lit with clear visibility across the parking area and within the foyers, with good coverage by CCTV cameras and a visible security presence

• Clear space guidance and zone marking: good signage at the entrance to zones about space availability to enable informed decisions and quicker access to an appropriate space and to re-unite visitors with their vehicles quickly and easily post visit

• Good disabled provision: good distribution of disabled spaces over a number of levels, but must be easy to find and close to exits

What makes up that parking experience?

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• Ready access from the car park to the destination: with at least as many people movements as cars in a car park, the ability for people to move freely between the car park and that destination is vital to ensuring good flow and the safety of these pedestrians

• Ready accessibility for disabled and those with buggies: accessibility features like lifts and space in foyer areas for those exiting or entering lifts is key; foyers often combine lift access, pay points and access to toilets, the car park and the destination – they quickly become congested and can be frustrating areas for users

• Ease of payment: at locations where payment is required for parking, the options need to be clear and clearly signposted; Help points that provide access to a real person can make a significant difference to those encountering difficulties with arranging payment for parking

These are all key elements of the parking experience and as the first and last physical touchpoint of the overall shopping experience, parking can have a significant impact on the visitor perception of the shops they have visited and their likelihood of returning.

Parking can have a significant impact on the visitor perception of the shops they visited and their likelihood of returning.

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It’s not always as straightforward as just adding more spaces. More doesn’t automatically equal better. Sometimes, you are constrained by the local geography and surrounding environment as to how many spaces you can have. Even if you do have the land available, the investment required to extend or expand existing facilities is not an easy business case to argue, especially if you cannot demonstrate that your existing capacity is already being fully utilised.

You can however, optimise the management of your existing capacity, making sure you get the most use from the spaces you have, which in turn should contribute to maximising the revenues you can yield within the retail stores they serve. Improving the utilisation of a car park by even one or two percent per annum can have a significant impact on

the revenues and profits made at a given location. Keep providing that positive experience and you remove those negative psychological barriers for visitors and that effect can snowball, bringing with it significant long-term customer loyalty. This directly translates to an improved bottom line; words that owners and investors love to hear.

Physically speaking, layouts, navigation, entry and exit points and accessibility are all parameters that can be reviewed and refined to ensure that the physical spaces themselves work and are seen as fit for purpose. There are numerous design consultants that can offer best practice guidance and support.

Whilst ensuring that accessing the car park and being able to easily get in and out of the space and vehicle when parked is undoubtedly an important part of the experience, being able to easily identify which area of the car park will have the space available is key: knowing the approximate final destination within a car park can eliminate the frustration of competing for or hunting down a space. Providing an immediate impact on a visitor’s psychological state, calming them and giving them a sense of a plan. More importantly, this smoother arrival allows the visitor more time to browse around the shop(s) at their own pace rather than feeling rushed and only seeking out those essential items they had specifically earmarked to purchase during their visit.

Conversely, having to blindly hunt for a space can be like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack and is often the most frustrating and time draining part of the experience and is frequently cited as taking anywhere between six and twenty minutes (or even more in some areas). Up to twenty minutes of driving slowly up and down seemingly endless rows of occupied spaces adds to the congestion of traffic already around the car park, needlessly wastes fuel and pumps out potentially harmful emissions.

What can you do about your parking?

Having to blindly hunt for a space can be like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack and is often the most frustrating and time draining part of the experience

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Steve’s Story

Steve went to the January sales. He circled the car park 3 times before parking on a verge and walking what seemed like half a mile across the car park. He bought two shirts then ran out of time. He was annoyed, but not as annoyed as he was stuck in a queue for 35 minutes trying to get out of the car park. He shared his unpleasant experience with all of his friends.

Sally’s Story

Sally needed to get aftershave for Steve. She found a parking space first go, a short walk from the shop. Relaxed, she soaked up the Christmas atmosphere and bought a couple of stocking fillers. She grabbed a coffee on the way out, knowing how long it would take to reach the motorway. With a smooth hassle-free experience, she left the shopping centre and on the way home started planning her next shopping trip there with the girls to pick up some bargains in the January sales.

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One of the most effective methods for tackling this problem is to provide clear zonal marking and real-time space guidance via electronic variable message signs (VMS) on the car park and zone entrances so that people can quickly determine where they might most easily find a suitable space.

Visual guidance plays an increasingly important factor in helping visitors make informed judgements before they enter the car park, so that they can clearly target their desired parking zone and complete their journey to get parked and into the shops as soon as possible. They didn’t come to visit your car park, they came to spend time in the shops.

Behind the scenes, this visual guidance relies on real-time identification or calculation of parking space availability. This intelligence is typically provided by some form of vehicle presence detection that either counts or analyses flows in and out of car parks using sensors at entries and exits or using technology that enables occupancy detection down to individual parking bay level for that extra degree of granularity and control.

There is a growing array of different sensing solutions out there to service this need, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses and will work well in certain environments. These solutions include:

• Automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) - often used especially in paid parking situations where enforcement or stopping people abusing the spaces is a priority; usually positioned near entries and exits of car parks. This also enables you to understand repeat visits and vehicle identification via white/black lists within the system

• Overhead bay detection – come in a variety of forms using different sensor technologies such as cameras monitoring multiple bays simultaneously or ultrasonic, with some linking coloured LEDs to indicate available bays in multi-storey car parks.

• In-ground bay detection – sensors (usually magnetometer, IR, radar or a combination thereof) either embedded into the bay surface or mounted on the surface that detect the prolonged presence of a vehicle in the bay

• Inductive loops – the most prevalent and still one of the most effective options for cost efficient counting of vehicle movements in and out of car park entries and exits; the same technology is used to monitor traffic flow on the highway network.

So what’s the secret to easy parking?

Visual guidance plays an increasingly important factor in helping visitors make informed judgements before they enter the car park

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Behind all of this sensor technology there has to be an engine room; something that can make sense of all this data and translate it into meaningful information both for the car park visitor by displaying on the VMS on the journey to, outside of and within the car parks; and for the operators to help you understand patterns of use and identify peaks and troughs or areas of under-utilisation that you can then tackle through marketing campaigns, changing the mix of retail tenants or other initiatives that seek to attract more visitors to the area.

All of this intelligence enables parking operators to design and implement parking solutions that can increase revenue and profitability, as well as improve operations and the experience for the end user.

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As highlighted in a study conducted by the ROI Team in 2012 in Ashbourne Kent, well designed, informative and efficiently run parking can make a world of difference to the shopping experience and ultimately the success of the retailer, retail park or shopping centre. The research found that 66% of visitors to the area said that car parking influences their choice of where to shop ‘sometimes’ or ‘always’. It also found that effective parking solutions will:

What difference does it really make?

1. Attract new shoppers who

appreciate being able to find a space quickly and easily

3. Keep shoppers at the centre

longer, increasing propensity to spend and therefore revenues for

stores to grow

5. Decrease the number of visitors who chose not to park

8. Greatly reduce management

time and cost of having to physically direct traffic on and

off the site

6. Decrease tenant vacancies by being able to demonstrate attractiveness of location and

visitor numbers

4. Increase insight about

parking habits, usage patterns and maximising ability to determine best use of space

2. Maintain shopper loyalty by making a more enjoyable shopping experience from

start to finish

9. Pay for themselves many times over as even a small

percentage increase in utilisation can yield significantly enhanced

revenues for the retail outlets on site

7. Enable land owners / operators to demand higher rates from tenants by being able to demonstrate higher than average

footfall of shoppers

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The rationale often used for not investing to deliver a great experience is that the cost is too high. However, which is likely to be higher, the revenues you are losing per annum through people getting frustrated, not finding a space and leaving and those who do find a space but are pressed for time, so only buy the essentials; or the increase in revenues after the initial outlay for a solution that will enable more visitors to enjoy a great shopping experience, spend more money per visit and keep coming back time after time?

When looking at return on investment, the more time you can give shoppers in store as opposed to queuing or searching around for a parking space, the more time and more relaxed they feel and this directly translates to greater spend and more revenues for the stores. Simple ROI tools can effectively demonstrate a strong return on investment, often paying back within the first year of use.

Without being able to leverage the intelligence that parking solutions can provide, you could well be restricting opportunities for revenue growth by not measuring how efficiently your space is working for you. You could realise that a certain portion of your car park is never used and might serve you better by converting it into an additional retail space to attract even more visitors to site.

Without a solution in place, at peak times you are almost certainly spending a lot of management time and effort physically directing traffic around your site, time that could be better spent planning for growth.

Flying blind with regard to potential problems with congestion and traffic flow in and around your site can itself be costly, putting off frustrated visitors from returning your site and potentially attracting unwanted attention from the local authority planning or highways departments, who may then be uncooperative should you look to expand or alter accessibility to your site in the future.

Helpful solution providers will be able to help you create a meaningful business case that justifies any investment and they should also be able to offer a range of different options by which your solution can be financed. Most common is up front purchase, with or without maintenance.

A word of caution here is that maintenance of any solution should never be considered optional when your visitors are reliant on it. Other options usually including leasing or more innovative approaches such as data as a service, whereby the provider is responsible for setting up and maintaining the solution and you simply pay for the service and access to the data on a subscription basis. Whichever option you choose, it is the stores, retail parks and shopping centres that offer this extra level of service that stand to gain the most, enhancing loyalty of existing visitors as well as stores and attracting new ones.

Is it really justifiable?

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Whatever you do, engage with a partner early on to really thrash out what your priorities are and to help you shape the most appropriate solution to meet those needs and establish what success really looks like.

There are plenty of parking solutions companies that claim to be able to solve car parking challenges. Indeed, there is a very large industry built around parking enforcement and they provide a very compelling case, but is that the right choice for encouraging greater use of your retail environment? In the case of shopping, carrot is often more effective than stick and a lot of the providers are less interested or able to deliver a solution that focuses on creating a positive car parking experience for visitors that keeps them coming back.

Companies may have good individual products or excellent ideas around what to do. However not all can provide a consolidated solution that can cover all requirements.

So when considering who to bring in and what you may need to create a solution, questions to ask a potential parking solutions partner would be:

• What examples of previous work can be shown?

• Is there the chance to go and see previous solutions in action?

• What benefits should be expected from a potential solution?

• Can you give examples of where these benefits have been achieved?

• Is it possible to see a demo of the software in action?

• Does the company provide the training, ongoing maintenance and back up in case things go wrong?

• What installation and ongoing SLAs are in place to cover the work?

• How would you help us identify the right solution for our needs?

Exploring the above subjects with a potential supplier will give you a very good idea if they are competent and able to do what they claim to be able to do.

How do you start to solve your parking challenge?

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Right now, delivering a pleasurable parking experience is the first challenge for many operators. Planning 12 or 24 months on and you might want to think about how you can use this part of the overall shopping experience to do more. For example, could you extend this capability by letting people know before they set off from home, which part of your car park is likely to be easiest to park in when they arrive?

Could you at the same time notify them what offers are on in the stores to entice them into other areas or stores? What about if you could personalise those offers to the individual based on previous shopping habits? What about using space on the electronic VMS signs as key advertising space for stores to promote offers or campaigns?

All of these ideas are entering the realm of the possible, through mobile apps that visitors subscribe to and give permission for capturing and using their data coupled with using beacon technology at the sites to push out targeted messaging.

As technology continues to progress and become ever more present through big data and the Internet of Things, then creating a positive shopping experience can be stretched from being just at the location to across the whole journey from home to store and back to the home again.

How could you heighten that customer experience further in the future?

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The retail space is a competitive environment and operators must use every advantage to fight for the consumers’ pound. With the large majority of shoppers still using their own vehicles to travel to out of town retail destinations, the demand for efficient and easy parking that kicks off the shopping experience in the right way is on the increase.

The impact on a retailer or operator of a good or poor parking experience is significant, not only in the short term but also to the long-term return that can be expected from that site. If you get it wrong you alienate a large proportion of your potential visitors, and tenants will follow; get it right and visitor numbers will increase and so will your revenues and your profits.

There are many types of car parking solutions available to help improve the parking experience but you need to be clear on what you want to achieve and how you are able to measure the improvements coming from any solution.

We provide end-to-end systems for parking intelligence, to suit all sorts of retail operations, from sheds to retail parks and shopping centres.

Car parking capacity is a valuable asset, even more so when it’s being used efficiently. Intelligence gleaned from our solutions enables car park managers to make strategic decisions that yield the best return from that asset.

Our retail parking solutions provide full visibility on the use of the car park and provide a positive start and end to the shopping experience. The combination of our vehicle count systems, parking bay sensors and variable messaging signs means users can be guided directly to the nearest available space, allowing them to maximise their time in store without needing to rush.

First impressions count and shoppers tend to spend more when relaxed and in a happy frame of mind. That starts when parking is simple.

Summary

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