Editor’s note: ParkWhiz has since rebranded to Arrive.
By Ryan Kern, Director of Operations, ParkWhiz
The parking industry, like many other industries, is experiencing rapid change through innovation. But innovation alone will not assure success for any player in the space. In my opinion, exceptional customer support is the key. In the year that I’ve been at ParkWhiz, we have experienced immense growth, which is significantly attributed to our focus on the customer.
ParkWhiz provides superior, all-encompassing customer experiences. We listen closely to the feedback our customers provide and ensure that we go the extra mile for everyone who takes the time to interact with us. Since we truly value our customer’s time and input, our goal for each interaction is to exceed their expectations. One way we are able to do this is by providing personalized answers. Each time a customer reaches out to us, we leverage the activity feed and objects within the Kustomer timeline to quickly gain information on purchase history, favorite locations, and previous interactions with our team. Having robust information on each customer’s experience with our product in one place allows us to quickly provide tailored answers, which demonstrates our commitment to solving each unique inquiry with the first reply.
The customer timeline also provides us opportunities to provide proactive support. For example, if we are assisting a customer who has a historical pattern of purchasing parking in Washington DC, but has just booked parking in NYC for the first time, it presents an opportunity for us to provide helpful insight about the nuances of Manhattan parking. By offering a few additional tips and tricks we are able to reduce a future interaction that pertains to the differences in markets. Since we made our transition to Kustomer, it has been extremely refreshing to have migrated from a ticket-based world, where questions would come in and our team would just solve the ticket in front of them in a somewhat siloed view, now to a world where our agents are now focused more on “finding the best way to assist this particular customer”.
Another priority for our CX team is to be available for our customers when and where they need us. Customers often use the channel that is most convenient for them at the moment, which is why we offer multiple communication channels, including text, email, phone, and social media support. Kustomer makes it simple for us to manage this mix of channels because everything is built natively into the system. Whereas previously, our communication channels were all housed in different platforms, which meant we were constantly challenged to sync data across platforms.
Kustomer’s omnichannel support integrates all of our data into one place and enables our team to partake in continuous conversations over multiple channels. Our reps will often start conversations with customers on the phone, then pivot to text or email based on the situation. A customer can easily send a text or email to us to provide additional context while speaking with a CX rep on the phone. This new information quickly shows up in the customer timeline, enabling us to continue providing seamless service without having to hunt around for another ticket in the queue and trying and match it up with the original phone call.
The impact of providing real-time, dynamic customer support has been extremely significant on our business. Our retention rate for customers who interact with our CX team is actually 2 to 3 percentage points higher than the average retention rate for our entire user base. We have also found a strong correlation between customers who were “Very satisfied” with their customer experience and their actions to promote ParkWhiz within their circle of family and close friends.
Switching to Kustomer has enabled us to provide support that truly differentiates ParkWhiz. As the mobility industry continues down the path toward connected and autonomous cars, ParkWhiz is a chief architect in how parking fits into the transportation ecosystem. We are combining our tech innovation with our superior user experience, proactive support, and internal efficiency. With all these parts in play, our path to success becomes much more defined.
About the Author: Ryan Kern leads operations at Parkwhiz, whose mission is to free you from the hassles of everyday travel. ParkWhiz makes it faster and easier for you to find the perfect parking space so that you can focus on your destination, rather than on the logistics of getting there. Ryan studied operations management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and has helped drive awesome customer experiences at ParkWhiz since September of 2016.
