Using data to assist the management of your car park

Data is fast becoming a popular tool for businesses to learn how their customers behave, understand their preferences and identify trends in consumer habits.

This data can be analysed and acted upon to improve customer experiences for the majority of businesses across a variety of sectors.

How do I use data for car park management?

Traditionally, parking is an anonymous activity, which can make it challenging to learn from visitor behaviours and habits in order to improve the management of your car park.

Larger businesses such as universities, hospitals and large retail parks can often have several car parks to manage on their property. Due to this, enforcing parking regulations and preventing unauthorised or obstructive parking is more challenging. This is where a data-driven approach to car park management can really help.

Capturing data about visitors can allow for a deeper understanding of who your customers are, how long they typically stay for and why they use your car park in the first place. This information can be practically applied to implement more efficient car park management solutions.

For example, with several car parks to manage, you may begin to notice through data analysis that some of your car parks often have many free spaces available throughout the day, while others are at full capacity. Being aware of this can allow you to reconfigure regulations or restrictions on these car parks and ease demand on other areas.

Ensuring that your space is being used to its fullest potential can allow you to generate more revenue from parking payment systems such as pay and display and permit parking. Additionally, by maximising the availability of spaces on your property you may also be able to prevent the occurrence of unauthorised parking. If visitors know they can easily access your car park, they will be less likely to risk a parking fine by parking either on a curb or in an unauthorised space.

So in summary, the benefits of using data to manage your car park are as follows:

• Gain insights into customer behaviour
• Understand trends in demand for spaces based on time of day, seasons, weather or local events
• Build relationships with your visitors
• Increase revenue
• Benchmark against your competitors more easily

Using ANPR for data collection

Automatic Number Plate Registration (ANPR) is used to precisely track and monitor vehicles in your car park. Primarily ANPR acts as an automated solution to car park management, ensuring that your car park regulations are enforced and monitored around the clock.

The nature of ANPR technology means it registers, tracks and stores information on all cars entering or leaving your car park. This useful data can be accessed and analysed in order to draw conclusions about your visitors’ behaviours. This could include understanding how many visitors your car park receives over a specific period of time, how long each visitor typically stays and how frequently they return to your car park.

This information can be used to improve your existing car park management systems such as aligning parking permits with visitor behaviours or introducing an account-based system where you can send your visitors incentives or updates about available parking on your property during times when your capacity is typically low.

Collecting data from ANPR can also help your business identify and prevent problems such as over-capacity or insufficient marked disabled bays before they occur.

Need a helping hand?

At Creative Car Park we offer a range of car park management solutions that your business can use to more effectively manage your car parking spaces and collect data about your visitors.

Our ANPR technology reads vehicle number plates with high accuracy and without need for human intervention. The Creative Car Park TrafficGuard system, designed as an alternative to clamping, also allows access to data and information about your car park usage and could compare it against contextual factors such as weather and time.

Our TrafficGuard system provides information about:

• Parking capacity
• Parking habits
• Parking duration
• Arrival and departure patterns
• Customer shopping patterns
• Revenue generation potential

With the data collected by our ANPR systems you can easily update any other car park management solutions we provide, such as our permit parking solutions, to meet the demands and trends in your visitor behaviours.

All of our car park management systems collect data in line with GDPR regulations, giving you and your customers peace of mind.

If you would like more information regarding our ANPR parking management system, including TrafficGuard, you can request a free, no-obligation audit of your car park by clicking here.