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From today (3 August) on street car parking around the City of Edinburgh will feature RingGo pay-by-phone as an option, allowing motorists to use credit and debit cards as an alternative to coins. RingGo replaces the current mPark phone service across the capital. Timescales for this major project for RingGo have been tight: with the City of Edinburgh Council stipulating that the new service is in place before end of August when the mPark system switches off; together with additional pressures on city centre parking throughout the month of August, due to the Edinburgh Festivals season. This meant the RingGo implementation team working to a tight and inflexible timescale of a week during which they had to resticker almost 1200 parking machines before the seven different Festivals commence. RingGo has also adapted its communications for this launch. Edinburgh World Heritage City status meant an adaptation of the standard signage, with less prominent stickers and the Councils branding incorporated. Messages to members of the public have required a different emphasis, as the previous supplier used a combination of mobile phone, payment card and interaction with the ticket machine, in order to deliver a physical voucher, which motorists displayed in their windscreen. This provided its own set of challenges according to Anne Snelson, Marketing Manager for RingGo. "In all our previous phone parking takeovers, while there have been differences between the services, we've always transferred one 'ticketless' service to another," she says. "In Edinburgh, as well as encouraging new users onto the service, we need to encourage existing customers, by explaining that they don't need a physical voucher, and they don't need to press any buttons on the machine." "With nearly two million visitors expected for the Edinburgh Festivals, it's a great time to be showcasing our service," Snelson concludes. |
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