Helsinki City: Customer-centricity for residential and corporate parking

The number of cars and amount of traffic in Helsinki has more than doubled in two decades. Approximately 32,000 of the city’s residents and employees have purchased parking permits that allow them to park in residential and business parking spaces. The permits required regular renewal.

Previously, the application process was burdensome: the permit applicants had to visit the Urban Environment Division's customer service office in person, with up-to-date documents to prove their residency, vehicle ownership and, in some cases, employment. This has led to unnecessary hassle, travel, and loss of working or leisure time. Since Helsinki's vision is to be the world’s most functional city, it was time to make the application process digital and customer-centric.

By identifying the needs and behaviour models of different customer groups as well as the desired customer experience, we were able to co-create a customer-centric digital parking permit service, despite the strict criteria for obtaining the parking permits.

We started out by deepening our customer understanding by analyzing conversations on social media. We identified the thought patterns at both the positive and negative extremes and noted neutral opinions, and conducted qualitative user interviews with the representatives of these thought patterns. We also quickly introduced the prototype of the digital service and developed it further with the interviewees. This resulted in a diverse view of customer satisfaction and insight for improving it.

The final output of the project was an easily understandable handbook for the digital service for purchasing and maintaining residential and corporate parking permits. We also created the concept and features for a digital service for managing the permits for city employees. The handbook crystallizes the different customer needs and defines the service promise, ground rules, service delivery process, communication guidelines, service metrics and use cases and features.

In Finnish municipalities, decision-making is partly political, partly determined by customer needs and partly in the hands of civil servants. In the course of the project, these different, and even contradictory, perspectives were made visible and critically analysed. We helped form a concept of a service that balances the different perspectives and utilizes the API interfaces of official registers.

The 32,000 customers will be directed to a digital parking permit service, reducing the number of contacts and visits to customer service officers and significantly improving the customer experience. The service will allow residents and employees working in Helsinki to easily apply for and manage their permits online - another step towards making Helsinki the world's most functional city.

With the help of the concept handbook and user interface illustrations, the service development can be started efficiently - with a focus on customers - using agile development methods. The concept and its customer-centric creation process were also introduced to several Product Owners and developers working on other projects in the City of Helsinki, adding more shared value and strategic insight.