As an operator of parking facilities, you’re continually looking for ways to reduce costs and improve bottom line performance in your own organization.
Many organizations have implemented fee programs that are billed along with monthly parking charges, as one way to recoup operating costs. Through our work with parking organizations across North America, along with surveys and independent research, the Zephire team has four tips to help you implement an effective permit parking fee strategy to offset costs and encourage customers to utilize self-service options that promote convenience and efficiency.
- Transition from Permit Deposits to Activation Fees
If you’re still collecting permit deposits that are refundable when customers sign up, it may be time to rethink this practice and convert to one-time activation fees that are not refundable and can help offset other monthly parking program costs. Click here to read our blog on this topic and access a tool that will help you to evaluate your program.
- Use Fees to Strategically Reduce Time Consuming Tasks for Your Team
Manual processes like mailing paper invoices and posting cash and check payments are time consuming for your team. Help customers select more automated alternatives by assessing fees for paper invoices and manual payments. Analyze your program for these types of activities and assess a more generic convenience fee where you find these inefficiencies. An opposite approach to this could be building in these fees to your standard pricing and offering discounted parking rates for customers who opt in to digital invoices and automated payments.
- Leverage Your Billing System to Automate Fee Collection
Your monthly parking management system should be able to automate the collection of program fees from sign up through recurring processing fees each month. Within Zephire, you can set up these fees and let the system do the work for you. Eliminate the effort involved in manually tracking and posting these charges.
- Be Open About Your Fees: Include Fees in Your Parking Rules and Regulations
As consumers ourselves, we all know that unexpected fees and charges are frustrating to see on an invoice. Publicize fees within your monthly parking program in your rules and regulations. Also, look for opportunities to explain what the purpose of a fee is, so customers can understand the value they gain as a result. This could be a more convenient experience, security of their data or other benefits customers gain through a specific charge.
Are you interested in learning more about how you can automate fee programs like these and many other aspects of your permit management program? Zephire is here to help! Contact us today to learn more.
