Enhancing Customer Experience in Mall Parking

The next revolution I believe is about creating loyalty programs, creating online booking programs, whereby we start to develop knowledge of those customers coming into the car parks. That is where I see the future is moving quite rapidly and that addresses this whole issue of paying by credit cards or other electronic means.

Wilfred Menezes

I just wanted to add a point here to what Benu said. She wants her customers to enter the mall with a smile, be comfortable and feel at home so that they can shop as much as they want. But all these plans can be defeated if the customer is frustrated because he cannot find a parking space and has to spend a long time for this. Also, customers circling around for long looking for parking spaces add to the traffic congestion and also wear and tear of the car park. Having a nice flooring, probably with Teflon or epoxy coating, having colour codes or may be making parking zones with fruits or animals signs are all good, but there are times when customers tend to forget where they have parked the cars and all this good work can be defeated. Customers have already got a plan in their mind, what they have to go and buy in the mall, so they tend to pay the least attention to the place where they parked the car. This issue can be addressed through innovations brought about by the latest technologies. Nowadays, in larger car parks, there is technology available whereby the users can go to a kiosk which is integrated with the parking guidance system, punch in their number plate and the system will tell them where the car is parked and how to reach there. So if you have the spending power to buy these technologies, the solutions are also there.

Nimish Sonawala

Speaking on the subject of customer convenience, there are many ways in which we can increase convenience for parking for the customers. The shopping centre parking should be part of the smart city plan. In Hong Kong, there is the Octopus smart card which can be used in the mall, shopping centres as well as parking lots. A similar thing can be done here in India. The mall or shopping centre industry is maturing. Some developers / operators may own more than one shopping centre and they want to have a loyalty card or a customer cash debit card which end customers can use in multiple places. The parking tickets dispensed at the malls can also have all kinds of promos advertised on the tickets: perfume tickets and so on. These are not only ways to enhance the experience for the end customers so that they can find what they want quickly, but also ways for the shopping centre to generate quicker and much better revenues and give good service to the end customer. The more convenience we provide the customers, the more profit we generate. Technology is certainly an enabler to do that. There are good service providers as well as mall managers who actually come with interesting ideas and we are here to support and develop the technology so that they can implement those ideas.

Benu Sehgal

It would be good to have one card convenience given to parking customers. We have multiple malls, so why should the customer keep haggling about the parking ticket in all the malls? There could be just one card which he can upload, put money in it from the net or at one of the concierge rooms and then he just swipes the card and goes in. He could also use this at multiple car parks and shop without any hassles.