Reliability to the rescue for inner-city parking woes

EasyPark Group has a long history in the parking industry, but as they’ve grown (and boy have they grown), the world of parking has changed. EasyPark aims to improve the urban life experience by balancing parking supply and driver demand. A task that’s kept them on their toes and at the forefront of parking technology for more than 20 years.

EasyPark is doing its bit to help people find and pay for parking more effectively – digitally. And, it’s not just end-users they’re helping out. EasyPark works together with cities all over the world on traffic strategy, policies, and analysis based on the parking data they collect, to improve the parking process for everyone.

Armed with the mission to help make cities more liveable, they needed a partner that could not only offer timely mobile notifications, but that could also offer reliable security to help build trust in their app.

Challenge: Finding a secure, reliable solution

“Parking isn’t something people usually do for fun,” jokes Robert Petersen, Business Developer at EasyPark Group. But seriously, “people aren’t feeling calm and carefree when they want to park their car, it can be stressful – you’re on your way to do something else, and EasyPark is the solution for making the experience as pain-free as possible. It’s crucial for customers to securely access our app in the moment of need to find and pay for a parking space and get notifications when their parking session is about to expire.”

Timely communications were table stakes in any new supplier relationship – they’d been burned before, so reliability had to be the driving force behind any new partnership.

There was also a need for effective communications with customers migrating to the EasyPark app, customers who had been acquired in EasyPark Group’s extensive M&A program.

Solution: Reliability as standard with Sinch

Just like any app-based company, security and UX are top of mind for EasyPark Group. It’s all about providing the best possible experience in the exact moment it’s needed in a trusted environment.

When it came to building security into their app log in Petersen commented, “SMS Verification was the natural choice for us, we were driven by the product’s high reliability, and it has not let us down – it’s been a really good experience so far.” Sinch’s no-fuss, scalable SMS Verification does the job in seconds thanks to optimized routes, high delivery, and low latency.

For notifications on parking expiry time, the choice was just as easy. Petersen explains why: “Users actively want SMS over a push notification. We have a few million customers who have activated that option because they simply prefer it.”

But with SMS, there’s another issue to consider. Petersen explains, "if an SMS parking expiration notification goes awry, there will be a parking fine to pay. Our customers rely on SMS notifications to keep an eye on their parking specifically to avoid fines; these notifications are essential to our service. So, I said, reliability is super important for us."

Results: Delivering and converting like a dream

For EasyPark, it’s easy to monitor SMS Verification and SMS deliverability – “if there are no complaints, the system is working,” laughs Petersen, “I honestly haven’t heard of a single issue. Since we launched Sinch Verification in our app, our conversion rate went up by about 7% compared to our previous supplier. This is a huge increase for us; the numbers are much more stable now than previously, and the errors and support cases have essentially stopped altogether.”

Also, thanks to SMS, EasyPark Group has been able to monitor customer communications on its acquisition integration program. As Petersen explains, “we send a lot of communications post-merger to encourage customers to migrate to our app. The conversions we see here are unbelievable. SMS moves the needle so quickly, and we get a lot of value out of it.”

The fact that integration only took about a week makes EasyPark even more sure they chose the right partner; as Petersen commented, “we’re very happy with the partnership.”