Canterbury Case Study

Synopsis

Canterbury City Council embarked on a procurement exercise in 2018, led by their digital team, to transform the customer journey in parking to reduce friction and make it easier for customers to use parking facilities. 

Challenge

Canterbury City Council saw that there were opportunities to make parking easier for customers to use and for the Council to manage.  The digital team recognised the opportunity presented by technology to implement a centralised solution for parking, meaning that it would be easier to manage parking locations from a single system and introduce more convenient ways for customers to pay.

Sagoss Solution

The Sagoss Blinkenterprise platform was chosen to run Canterbury’s off-street parking estate.  Using Blink meant that the Council were able to use ANPR (Automated Number Plate Recognition) alongside Sagoss’s intelligent parking kiosks and the Mobon cashless payment app to implement a cashless, barrierless and ticketless customer parking journey.  Key to this is Sagoss’s intelligent tariff mechanism that allows the Council to instantaneously implement intelligent, flexible tariffs to incentive users to return to the high street, take advantage of joint offers with retailers and to use Autopay to pay in a completely frictionless manner as they exit the car park.

The introduction of ANPR in our major car parks has given us flexibility in our service delivery and the ability to respond quickly to the changing demands of our customers. Positive feedback is strong and our customers tell us how simple they find the system is to use. We’ve benefitted from longer dwell times and increased revenue compared to comparative ticketed systems and we have over 43,000 customers registered online with all the benefits that brings to marketing and promoting to a relevant audience.

Colin Perris

Parking Facilities Manager, Canterbury City Council