Over the past decade, the retail landscape has changed dramatically, with a shift in consumer behaviour towards online shopping. In 2021, retail ecommerce sales were an estimated $4.9 trillion US dollars worldwide. Over the next four years, it is predicted this number will grow by 50%, reaching approximately $7.4 trillion by 2025.
At the same time, we have also seen a huge growth in the online booking market. Online booking is quickly becoming the new standard across numerous appointment and reservation-based industries, including beauty, health, restaurants, and parking. And by 2025, the online booking market is expected to generate a revenue of $552.1 million with a CAGR of 14.4%, fuelled by the ever-increasing number of internet users.
As the Internet becomes the default solution for parking customers and B2B partnerships, it’s important to offer users a seamless digital experience that aligns with their daily lives. Consumers expect an optimised user experience as a basic requirement, and they expect it across all platforms and devices.
In line with a focus on user experience, it’s crucial to understand why customers visit your website. What do they need? Invariably, they are looking for a convenient and reliable service. This knowledge makes it possible to develop a targeted user experience (UX) strategy that offers the best solutions for customers and employees alike.
First impressions count
As your venue looks to engage parking customers digitally, it’s essential to focus on delivering a frictionless online experience that generates bookings and ongoing loyalty. Forrester Research found that a well-designed user interface could raise website conversion rates by 200%. But if you’re willing to put in the work, the study also found that exceptional UX design could help increase conversion rates by a whopping 400%.
When a customer lands on your site, you have only seconds to capture their interest. However, investing in UX optimisation makes it possible to improve brand recognition, increase trust and ensure retention within those vital moments.
Discovering what’s important to customers’ UX
UX strategies can seem complicated, particularly when deciding exactly what will work for your parking business. There is a wealth of ideas, approaches and technologies on offer. However, we tend to see companies copying their competitors’ UX ideas, which doesn’t necessarily meet the needs of their own target audience. To achieve an effective and enjoyable user experience for your parking business, you need to analyse your data.
Analysing your customer data and browsing behaviour will help you determine what’s most important to them, why they visit your website, and, ultimately, how to improve your user experience. Our Business modules, including Analytics, Reporting and Centralised Customer Information Management, provide clear and meaningful insights to help you get to know your customers and optimise your parking booking website.
What is the value of good UX?
UX makes the complex easy to use, effectively improving how a business and its customers interact with a website across multiple devices and platforms. In both internal and external operations (customer-facing and B2B interactions), a strong user flow will lead to increased sales, increased customer retention, a lower cost of customer acquisition, lower training costs and a higher market share.
Creating User Flow with improved Parking Ecommerce UX
UX is important for consumers, as well as businesses that want to convert website or app visitors into bookings. Here are some UX features that create user flow for customers and improve operations for internal users.
1. Mobile Commerce
Mobile bookings are increasing in the travel industry. According to Business Wire, the mobile travel booking market is expected to grow with a CAGR of 12.2% during the forecast period from 2021 to 2029, starting from $1,067.2 million in 2020.
With as much as 70% of all website traffic coming from mobile, your website must be mobile-optimised. In fact, market leaders recommend that it’s better to adopt a mobile-first approach rather than trying to replicate the desktop experience on mobile. This ensures the text is big enough to read, and users can access images, videos and interactive content on all devices. In addition, a good UX requires fast page loading speeds, an intuitive, brand-matched interface and trustworthy payment gateways. Essentially, your mobile-first website should retain as much functionality as possible to deliver the best user experience.
With the Rezcomm Marketplace, your customers will enjoy an easy and seamless booking experience on every device.
2. Guest checkout and account options
Did you know that one of the major causes of cart abandonment is requiring users to create an account? Improve your parking business website’s user experience with guest checkout and account creation.
Guest checkout enables customers to make a booking without handing over all their details. At the same time, creating an account allows users to quickly log in to complete their booking in future.
The Rezcomm Marketplace is simple to configure for both guest checkout and full account access. Delivering access to both groups via one time passcodes. Safe, secure and not another password to remember!
3. Intelligent search functionality
The easier and quicker it is for customers to locate the appropriate parking reservation on your website, the more chance you have of them converting. Using Rezcomm’s intelligent Parking Reservation search widget, customers can search, cost and book their parking reservation within minutes.
4. Visualisation
Visualisation plays a vital role in improving UX for customers. For example, you could provide a map showing customers the distance between your car park and the venue or terminal building. Visualising the reservation ensures they know exactly what they will get for each pricing option, making booking more straightforward.
There is also the opportunity to upsell or cross-sell products to the customer within the user flow. The Rezcomm Marketplace will determine what’s most important to them and choose the appropriate products or services based on the customer’s behaviour. For example, suppose they prioritise convenience over cost. In that case, they might be interested in purchasing a fast track ticket for your airport or venue.
5.Customer support
Sometimes customers will need a little extra support to make a parking reservation on your website. The easier it is to get their questions answered, the more likely you will get them to convert. Not only that but good customer support can also help to improve brand loyalty and increase customer retention.
A simple FAQ page can go a long way in improving user experience, but why stop there? Live chat support is increasingly expected as part of the online booking experience and will help ensure you don’t lose customers to competitors.
Chat to Rezcomm about our advanced Multilingual Chatbot, designed to help customers with their reservations and purchases.
UX is equally vital behind the scenes, smoothing the operation of your parking inventory and informing business decisions. Here are some UX features that create user flow for employees and operators…
6. User-friendly dashboards
Whether it uses a website, app or a B2B tool, every business can benefit from user flow. Our Business Intelligence module will bring your marketplace solution to life with a set of visual and easy-to-use dashboards and reports. Access all sorts of valuable insights and data, including but not limited to sales, average spend, operational movements and conversions. This information makes it easy to make the best decisions for your business and continuously see where you can improve UX.
And because our analytics and reporting dashboards are user-friendly, they don’t require hours of training for employees to benefit from the information they provide. By delivering actionable insights, UX uncovers the capacity to create new business models that go on to become a necessary part of the evolving digital landscape.
7. Real-time insights
Actionable insights in real-time can be a game-changer, saving time and money, improving conversions and optimising capacity.
Rezcomm’s reporting and analytics tools can lead to improvements in operational flow. For example, it is possible to measure financial performance, enabling you to quickly identify which products and services are performing well (or not) in real-time.
Operational reports provide real-time visibility of the arrival and/or departure associated with the visitor’s consumption of products or services. This information helps you plan for peak times and determine what resources are required to manage the visitor experience. It is also easy to monitor behavioural trends across your venue’s entire product and service range, predict your visitors’ needs and forecast real-time revenue projections. With real-time data at your fingertips, it is possible to take rapid action, meaning if things aren’t working well, they don’t stay that way for long.
8. Integration with your ERP system
Another way you can improve UX for your employees is to integrate reports with your ERP system. Sharing data efficiently and seamlessly across all departments allows for deeper exploration of analytics and helps to inform better business decisions.
9. Live Occupancy
Viewing and reacting to live occupancy can make a huge difference to your parking business. Our parking reservation software makes it possible to view live occupancy, compare gate prices to pre-book prices, and identify the prices that will encourage customers to book in advance. It takes the guesswork out of pricing your parking inventory, which is great for user flow from an operational point of view and has the added benefit of increased customer satisfaction. As a result, you can optimise your capacity, and customers will feel they’re getting a great deal.
10. Easy Product Management
Parking businesses require the flexibility to add new products, promotions, and bundles at speed to meet their capacity needs and customer requirements.
Our Parking module simplifies the process of designing products with availability rules and general settings tailored to your target audience. Manage pricing, images and content with ease and use our advanced yield management tools to optimise customer spend and occupancy.
UX for your parking business and customers
User experience and convenience are paramount in increasing conversions, retaining customers and growing your parking business. However, your parking booking system should also offer a great user experience for your team. There is no point in the customer having a smooth online journey, only for the booking to end up less than satisfactory due to problems behind the scenes. The front end and back end user experience must be seamless and streamlined for your business to succeed.
Are you interested in learning more about our Reservations modules and how we can help improve your parking business’s UX flow? Get in touch.
Orchestrating digital strategy, Victoria Wallace is Rezcomm’s Chief Digital Officer. With specialisations ranging from digital marketing and CRM to UX design and ecommerce, she is an expert in integrating innovation and technology to deliver outstanding results in sectors like travel, parking, and airports.
