Re-imagining the future of transport and parking

If you have a car, you need a space to park it. That seems like a simple proposition on the surface, but our ideas on what a parking service can and should be have moved on quite a bit since the first Model T rolled off the line in 1908.

Our Parking Client has always had one eye on the future, part of their mission statement is to identify opportunities to develop a fresh and more relevant approach to car parking. But, to do that, they needed clarity on what exactly their customer’s considered to be “fresh and more relevant”.

Providing that kind of clarity and linking businesses with precisely what their customers really need is at the heart of our service design. So, when they asked us to help them form a seamless, ideal parking experience, we turned to their customers to define what ideal really meant to them.

Leaps of faith are all well and good, but when it comes to creating a design-forward customer experience that our clients can really align behind, we’ll take reliable customer-driven data any day.

In our experience, most companies want to invest in a better experience for their customers, but in a market crowded with competitors, and with only limited capital to invest, a lack of clarity can see those aspirations grind to a halt.

After all, no-one wants to be the first to step off the edge.

How often do companies find themselves pushing in the wrong direction, driven by assumptions and inertia, rather than customer truths, and investing programs and tech that nobody asked for?

The reason our CX designs are so successful is that they are built on a bedrock of customer needs and stakeholder input, unified by comprehensive and insightful research techniques.

That’s why our first step in working was to communicate with key stakeholders through kick-off workshops and stakeholder interviews to define the challenge, identify the initial hurdles to overcome and absorb their insights to guide our research.

Having distilled our Parking Client’s four decades of experience in providing innovative parking solutions into a deeper understanding of the challenges at hand, we turned to their customers to provide the verbatims needed to build a solution.

We took deep dive into how their customers perceived the current parking experience for customers and its shortcomings through data-mining NPS surveys, customer interviews, online customer surveys, and shadowing customer service staff.

That raw data was then processed in actionable insights that combined their expertise and perspective with moments of truth from their customers.

By amplifying the voice of the customer through in depth-research, we provided the clarity of purpose they needed to make business decisions with complete confidence.

As part of creating a clear CX vision that would align and guide behaviours to inspire, we needed to build the customer’s needs into the foundations of every decision they made.

Our job would be a lot easier if concise customer-based research could uncover that perfect future-proof truth that could drive decision making for all time, but customers are people, and people change.

To make sure the customer’s needs stayed at the heart of their drive for the perfect parking experience, we created four customer-led need states, that summarised the reasons behind why certain users lean toward the different kinds of parking options.

Alongside those need state, we produced four complementary enablers that would inform the content and functionality their parking offers.

Rather than locking into a single static strategy, these needs states provide a flexible base that can be updated with customer feedback and adapt to changing customer preferences.

Our enablers were combined with customer-led and customer-validated user stories that further connected staff with their customers while also providing a prioritised list of actions that they could take to differentiate their services.

By the end of our partnership, our research connected them with their customers and provided clarity on what they felt was an exceptional parking service. This gave them the confidence to invest in the future.

Our prioritised user stories tuned customer verbatims into a guide on what to build and why while our mapping of the ideal customer journey gave them a tangible target to move towards safe in the knowledge that they were moving in, what their customers felt, was the right direction.