It’s becoming more and more common for parking operators to centralize the monthly parker billing process to gain efficiencies, improve separation of duties and provide a higher level of customer service to this parker population. We have found in our practice, that a few seemingly small program details can improve the ratio of monthly parking CSRs from 1 to 4,000 parkers to 1 to 7,000 parkers. If you’re not seeing this level of efficiency within your operation, read on to see if these are some of the reasons why.
It is essential that the Monthly Parking Department owns this information and the associated responsibilities to be efficient and provide high levels of customer service. The alternative is that the location’s manager maintains this information and approves each sign up, which means that each time the Monthly Parking Department attempts to process a sign up they must first contact the manager, taking up additional time for the department CSR and the manager, not to mention potentially putting the new customer sale at risk..
People have grown accustomed to receiving invoices electronically, and monthly billing is much more efficient when the majority of customers are invoiced in this manner. It has also become commonplace to charge customers a small fee each month for paper invoicing to cover the cost of this much more manual billing process.
I continue to be amazed by the volume of locations using paper hangtag credentials at both gated and un-gated facilities. The use of permanent hangtags or decals at un-gated facilities can simplify the monthly billing process. At gated facilities, the hangtags can be eliminated altogether, and the parker population can be managed through their access control devices.
Are you interested in more information about monthly parker billing processes? uDrive subscribers have access to tools and templates that can help. These can be found in the Resources for the Parking Operation and Location Audit Tools sections of the site.
