Yorkshire Water is a water supply and treatment utility company in England, providing services in the East Riding of Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, and most of North Yorkshire, as well as parts of Derbyshire.
The establishment is known for its water aid, reservoir scour testing, transferring sewage pumping stations, and understanding and improving real-time trends about water operations. Yorkshire Water offers a great green space for various outdoor activities. Their various locations offer space for fishing in reservoirs, hiking trails, kayaking, windsurfing, sailing, and more.
Due to the organisation’s size, Yorkshire Water has multiple car parks and we work with them at their Swinsty Moor, Stack Point, Thruscross, and Blubberhouses locations.
Antisocial behaviour such as vandalism has been one of the most recurring and concerning issues in Yorkshire Water’s Swinsty Moor, Stack Point, and Blubberhouses location. The signs, ticket and payment machines were frequently vandalised in the car park, raising serious concerns.
Additionally, with Yorkshire Water’s car park, it was essential to be considerate when incorporating enforcement. It was mainly because people using the car park came to indulge in outdoor activities and relaxation. So, strict enforcement can disrupt visitor experience. leading to negative experience. With a customer-focused approach, it was essential to promote and enforce car parking through careful planning, without disrupting the visitor experience.
While promoting a positive visitor experience, the client still wanted to earn steady revenue from all of their car parks. Further, the client was not fully sure about functioning one of the car parks among these sites. So, they wanted the car park to be a trial site for a bit and decide if they want to roll it out or not in the long run.
So, demand for highly detailed reporting was a priority to ensure positive feedback and keep the car park running. The detailed reporting contributed in making decisions to promote and enhance visitor experience in the car park.
Yorkshire water’s reservoirs are renowned for their high quality fly and coarse fishing in their Fewston, Swinsty and Thruscross locations. So, Yorkshire Water wanted a simple easy platform to manage fishing, parking and payments for better customer experience at their Swinsty Moor reservoir.
We worked very closely with the client to address ongoing issues, prevent and resolve them. We installed CCTV cameras on the site to prevent and stop frequent anti-social behaviour. It helps add an extra layer of protection to demotivate such behaviours.
We also introduced flexible payments over the standard method to encourage visitors to visit car parks. So, it meant that if visitors failed to pay for their parking, they had the option to pay till midnight on the day of their visit. We also made sure the car park had free blue badge permits, an easy annual permit system, alongside fishing permits to encourage people to visit nearby areas and use the car park.
We introduced a card-only system for purchasing fishing tickets directly from the parking ticket machine in Swinsty Moor’s car park. The season tickets had to be bought online, but parking was included alongside fishing tickets with no extra cost. We set up an easy-to-use online portal on Yorkshire Water’s website to apply for permits. The portal handles purchasing and managing information for parking permits included with free fishing tickets and is managed by Bransby Wilson.
With the CCTV throughout the car park, it has lowered the recurring antisocial behaviour in the area. To prevent and resolve it on a greater level, police have encouraged people to report anything suspicious.
Further, with active usage of car parks by visitors, the car park has benefited from increased and steady revenue. The earned revenue is also being put to good use.
It’s being efficiently utilised to upkeep the area and employ rangers too. So, it’s going to contribute towards better welfare and operation of the entire area.
The flexible payment solution to encourage visitors to use the car park is helping gain more users. With increasing numbers of visitors and good revenue, Yorkshire Water can make the trial car park a permanent one in the future.
The easy permit portal system for parking and fishing contributes towards a positive visitor experience, which favours Yorkshire Water’s customer-centric branding, impacted by frequent anti-social behaviour.