Meaningful Change - Courtesy of our Users

YourParkingSpace, a parking provider specialising in connecting drivers with private and commercial space owners, faced the same challenges as any booming startup.

In the constant push to evolve and upgrade, the platform has taken many avenues in order to best serve the users.

Despite being a rapidly expanding platform with comparatively small growing pains, the question remained as to whether the most effective and efficient methods of focused growth were being utilized.

With growth, the need to communicate and listen to our users was becoming glaringly obvious, resulting in the introduction of a Community Team, dedicated to improving and learning from the ever-expanding body of users.

I was personally tasked with developing this team.

Starting with our partly-addressed reviews, (which you can read in my project titled: "Driving Trustpilot Generation and Reputation Management") a clear presence was established across Facebook, Trustpilot, Twitter and various other social platforms.

From here, analytics and metrics were established per platform to gauge user engagement, satisfaction, sentiment and keywords/topics of interest.

This generated a very clear-cut list of priorities for us to address, letting us know exactly what our users loved, hated while also showing us, via invert; (and rather painfully, might I add) what features went unnoticed and unappreciated by our users.

Leveraging this information, our Community Team meets regularly with the back-end development team to flesh out proposals, typically resulting in swift and meaningful improvement.

If there is one thing that our users enjoy, it is hearing that their feedback has resulted in real, tangible platform updates, and nothing beats the competition quite like that.

Nobody finds reports particularly exciting but they are extremely important, especially as a company expands and the need for efficient, concise communication rises.

Naturally, a biweekly or monthly report bolsters company-wide knowledge so, time permitting, we'd ideally incorporate this into the role of somebody working closely with the community.

Public Image - The aforementioned wide presence of YPS has many clear benefits, helping form the company into a home brand. Positive feedback is displayed, negative feedback minimised (but always learned from)) and remedied in a customer-centric fashion.

User Engagement - An active community of users both within the platform and through social media that offer thorough feedback on their bookings, parking experiences and thoughts on the website/app.

Social Media Marketing - Working directly with the Marketing team to focus advertisements to the specific interests of our users, leveraging the many tracked metrics. These involve adverts through Google Search, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter.

Introducing Internal Feedback Gathering - Akin to something like Uber, we now gather immediate feedback on booking and user experiences, filtering out negative experiences to immediately learn from while mending the user relationship. Positive reviews can then be displayed per listing! This was fleshed out throughout a number of months directly between myself and the head of development.

Early Error Detection - Being the first point of contact for most issues and handling resolution swiftly can further earn the trust of users while minimising escalating complaints.

Relations with Trustpilot - We are a featured business for Trustpilot, meaning that we are used within their promotional material and training documentation/seminars.

Increasing Customer Support output by 40% - During my own Customer Support time, I created a strategy for partially automating Customer Support while keeping things as "human" as possible. This involved creating a large set of hotkeys, macros, processes (with documentation). The vast majority of customer concerns or questions are similar in nature so this was a great boon to our scalability.

Continued training of the Customer Support team - As great as the team is, anybody can get stuck in the motions and so a fresh pair of eyes is always good for perspective. I check in with the Customer Support team from time to time to have them refreshed and brought up to speed on best practices for winning over our customers, keeping things empathic as well as ensuring our team is happy and motivated to shine.