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:

1. Receiving Gifts
2. Words of Affirmation
3. Acts of Service
4. Quality Time
5. 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. 

So Why Carpe Datum (Seize the Data)?

By Katherine Beaty

First, data helps you make better decisions.  It adds long-term value to your organization, has positive financial implications, and gives your organization competitive advantages that are achievable in no other way.  All data is filled with potential if you can learn to mine it in a meaningful way.  While there are many influences when making decisions (what is happening within the organization, global or industry news, your gut) there is nothing as persuasive as having hard data to back you up.  This is true profit increasing power that you simply cannot afford to pass up.

Second, data helps you solve problems.  Tracking and reviewing data from business processes helps you uncover performance breakdowns so you can better understand each part of the process and know which step needs to be fixed and which areas are performing well.

Third, data helps you understand performance.  Perhaps a batter way to say this is data helps you see performance. Let’s say you have a top-performing sales rep to whom you send most leads.  However, when you delve into the data it shows that the salesperson does close deals at a lower rate than one of your other sales reps who receives fewer leads but closes deals at a higher percentage.  This performance data can then affect how you portion out leads, which can lead to a revenue increase.

Fourth, data helps you improve processes.  Every company feels the effects of waste.  It depletes resources, squanders time, and ultimately impacts the bottom line.  Data can help you understand and improve business processes so you can reduce wasted money and time.  Bad advertising decisions can be one of the greatest wastes of resources.  With data showing how different marketing channels are performing, you can see which ones offer the greatest ROI and focus on those.

Finally, and most importantly, data helps you understand consumers.  Without that data, how do you know who your customers are?  Which consumers like your products or programs?  What marketing efforts are effective?

Katherine Beaty is Vice President of Implementation with Tez Technology. She can be reached at katherine@teztechnology.com.