5 Languages of Love in Parking
By Katherine Beaty
The parking industry has changed very rapidly in the last few years. Vendors/operators/parking programs can no longer be dependent on their products and services to build meaningful and stainable customer relationships. We must move beyond the widget. So how do we move past just providing widgets? By asking the right questions. For example:
- What are my customer’s needs beyond just the product I provide?
- What are their pain points, bottlenecks, or headaches on a daily/weekly/monthly basis?
- Can I provide relief or possible solutions?
- How do I better connect with my customers?
It was this last question, “How do I better connect with my customers?” that gave me my epiphany. When it comes to making meaningful connections, I think about Gary Chapman’s book The Five Languages of Love. The five languages of love are:
- Receiving Gifts
- Words of Affirmation
- Acts of Service
- Quality Time
- Physical Touch
These ideas have now penetrated our common vernacular as people look for a better understanding of how to connect more deeply. These concepts are easy to understand; we are familiar with this kind of framework in our everyday lives. As it happens, building successful parking services is as much about understanding user psychology as it is about market dynamics.
We all speak different languages of love
In Chapman’s book about Love Languages, the primary lesson of the book was urging people to learn the other’s people’s languages and adapt their own behavior to better match how others preferred to receive love. In other words, when it comes to giving love, it is not about you! So do not focus your efforts on just one of the languages of love languages or you may lose a user base. For example, you may offer swag for users who leave a review, but also offer a rewards program to repeat users. You can offer direct access to support team within the product or provide users an option to buy into a VIP program that offers more benefits. The key is by letting people choose how they want to receive love with help you better understand their love language, and this will enable greater customer love in return, which then turns in to a happy loyal customer.
Katherine Beaty is Vice President of Implementation with Tez Technology. She can be reached at katherine@teztechnology.com.