The UK’s leading car park company NCP turned to Siemens to overhaul its infrastructure to improve customer service.
Management of car parking facilities can be a deal maker or a deal breaker for shopping centres. Customers want to be able to park quickly, shop, then pay and leave. They also want to know help is on hand if needed. Neil Robson, chief technology officer at National Car Parks (NCP), the UK’s largest car park provider, was keen to create one central point of contact for the customer, to ensure that enquiries were dealt with as quickly and effectively as possible.
The resulting National Operations Centre (NOC) in Croydon has replaced seven disparate centres nationwide. “The objective was to create a single view of NCP. It was about creating one voice, one central point of contact,” explains Robson.
The starting point of the project was an NCP review of parking operations which showed that the project was now free of the limitations which may have prevented it from being implemented previously. “The technology becoming available and the reduction in cost of communications equipment meant that the project was viable for the first time really. Before that we took a more local approach because of the limitations on both fronts,” reports Robson.
NCP’s relationship with Siemens had developed during the negotiation of a lease back deal on some of the equipment around six years ago, explains Robson. “Out of that role we discovered that it was more than just a traditional CCTV integrator type role, they could bring a lot more to the party in terms of development,” he says.
Technology partner Siemens offered a personalised finance agreement which involved the existing CCTV assets across 400 car parks being bought for around £2m and then leased back to NCP. “This enabled us to create a fund to do further upgrades and enhancements,” explains Hobson.
Each control desk at the NOC, which deals with an average of 3,000 enquiries every day, has a bank of six screens displaying real time audio and visual information. Added to this, the new technology allows operators to connect directly to each entry and exit system, CCTV camera or pay station in any NCP car park across the UK, enabling 95 per cent of customer problems to be resolved quickly and efficiently.
The NOC went live in October 2006 and NCP hasn’t looked back since. For the car parks connected to the system, everything is managed centrally – CCTV, ticket machines and even barriers can be raised and lowered by controllers at the NOC. Any queries that can not be solved remotely will then be referred to the company’s mobile support teams.
However, despite the less obvious presence of employees at exit and entry points, Robson says headcount hasn’t been reduced but car park staff are just making more effective use of their time. “It has meant that we can make better use of the deployable resource,” explains Robson.
“Rather than someone being sat for 24 hours in a box at the exit they can be out making sure the site is clean, that we are keeping the place safe and identifying assets that are not working. Because people are now able to be mobile it means that we are able to pick up on those things a lot more quickly than we would have done previously when they were sat in a box.”
“Because the guys are now visible and mobile rather then being static, then it has an impact on security. People see the yellow vest walking around the car park and both customers and potential customers become aware of their presence.”
