IPARC Remote Monitoring and Customer Service
About the Service
Precise ParkLink is the only parking technology and services provider in Canada that offers its clients an in-house remote monitoring and customer service centre. Located at our headquarters in Toronto, the Interactive Parking Access and Response Centre (IPARC) leverages our equipment’s network connections to monitor the health of your solution and respond in real time to customer inquiries made at your devices.
We understand that problems can occur anywhere at any time, so we staff IPARC with bilingual agents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year — even weekends and holidays. This ensures that all our clients — from coast to coast — are well served in the official language of their choosing. And because many of our clients never close their doors, neither do we.
But IPARC is much more than just a customer service call centre. Our staff are specially trained to assess the severity of alarms generated by our equipment, including Skidata’s gated systems and Flowbird’s non-gated systems. Staff are trained to diagnose issues remotely and, where possible, clear the alarms remotely; from the perspective of our clients and their customers, this takes place seamlessly, with no apparent reduction in service levels or equipment availability.
On occasions where an issue can’t be resolved remotely, IPARC staff will notify our e-service team, who will in turn create a service ticket and dispatch a service technician to correct the issue in person. Technicians and engineers may be dispatched from our Production and Support Centre in Toronto or from any of our regional offices across the country. Our service vehicles are also GPS-tracked, allowing e-service staff to dispatch the next available technician nearest your site.
For parking operations owners and managers looking for efficiencies in their portfolio, the IPARC service is a competitively priced alternative to on-site staffing, especially for sites with dramatically lower utilization rates during the overnight period. For those sites that need an on-site presence, IPARC is a useful backup to continue providing customer service remotely while a customer is being attended to at the parking office or booth, or when the on-site staff is on break.
And with the same technology and customer service training that on-site personnel receive, IPARC presents all the benefits of a lower-cost service option without any of the downsides for your solution or the parkers who use it.
HOW IT WORKS
The IPARC service leverages the IP technology that connects your technology to Precise ParkLink’s headquarters in Toronto, creating the capacity for two-way voice and video communication as well as remote monitoring and operation of the installed equipment.
The CCTV cameras that are integral to this solution are assigned a unique identifier that associates them with the piece of equipment they monitor. This lets IPARC staff observe how parkers are using the equipment and guide them through procedures accordingly — for example, has the parker reached out for support because their payment isn’t being accepted when in fact, they’re trying to tap their card in the wrong location? And by keeping track of the frequency and types of issues any machine experiences, we’re able to monitor trends and act accordingly.
We configure your solution so that IPARC staff can access each individual device, including the main server. This lets us diagnose hardware and software issues and coordinate or “push” fixes as required. It also allows us to address service issues, such as coaching parkers as they process their payments themselves or re-creating their entry ticket so they can make an appropriate payment.
A great deal of sophisticated design has gone into making the process entirely seamless from the parker’s point of view — if they experience an issue, they press the intercom button, and one of our agents resolves the issue for them, in real time. From the parker’s perspective, the audio contact, video surveillance, and equipment control that form the three pillars of the IPARC service operate as a single unified whole.
Like every other part of Precise ParkLink’s total access and revenue control solutions, IPARC is customizable to our clients’ needs, whether that means giving our staff read-only privileges to provide information to your parkers or full access to the system backend to troubleshoot issues in real time as they occur. We can also provide this service during peak times to support your existing staff, overnight, and on weekends to fill gaps in your present service offering or replace your on-site staffing component altogether — Precise ParkLink will work with you to achieve your business objectives, whatever they may be.
THE ADVANTAGES OF REMOTE MONITORING
Clients from coast-to-coast benefit each and every day from the efficiencies their parking operations are afforded by using the IPARC service.
Beyond the cost savings compared to on-site staffing, the greatest advantage with IPARC is how customizable the service is. We work with each new client to develop Standard Operating Procedures for their sites — response times for technician dispatches, how to handle lost ticket claims — and train our staff accordingly, ensuring your parkers always receive the service you want them to.
The following are a few more of the key benefits of implementing remote monitoring in your facility:
Cost Savings
One of the most important benefits to your facility is in a significant reduction in your staffing costs without compromising worker productivity. This efficient staffing model can be customized to your needs: some clients choose to leverage IPARC to cover their overnight shift while keeping an on-site staffing component during core business hours. Others have given their customer service over to IPARC entirely. Our clients know their customers best, and we can accommodate their needs, whatever they are.
Reduced Site Visits
The solutions we install are not only networked together but connected back to our headquarters over the internet. Short of hardware failures, like if a snowplow collides with an entry terminal, many issues and updates can be handled remotely without a technician having to visit the site to perform the work. Software updates, performing routine diagnostic work, clearing alarms, and many more routine tasks can be done more efficiently, and in instances where a technician is still needed on site, performing that diagnostic work while they’re on their way means a shorter service visit — all resulting in savings we pass on to you.
Decreased Equipment Downtime
Our clients expect their solution to be online and able to always process payments. IPARC monitors a wide variety of equipment status alarms in real time, including consumables running low, coin boxes getting full, etc. By monitoring these levels, we’re able to efficiently and proactively schedule service and maintenance to get the most work done in the fewest-possible visits.
Increased Parking Revenue
Closely related to reducing equipment downtime is increasing revenues from your parking operation. By ensuring that ticket rolls are always full and coin boxes aren’t, IPARC’s proactive monitoring of the solution means your parkers never have an excuse not to pay for their session.
Optimizing Your Parking Operation
Monitoring the health of your equipment is a vital function of any modern parking operation, and by leveraging the technology built into your solution, we’re able to perform this role at a fraction of the cost of staffing an on-site position to perform the work. This frees up your employees to perform other work as you see fit while letting experts in parking operations provide fast and efficient service to your parkers — 24/7/365.
