Region
UK & IRE
We are continually reviewing ways to improve our service to our clients and their customers by supporting our field technicians and helping to get them to their destination on time and with the minimum of delay. Parking, particularly in London, is a huge challenge for our technicians and is too often the cause of an abortive visit that we then need to reschedule. The AppyParking+ app has shown that, with the right tools, we can begin to combat this issue and drive increased first-time job success for customers.
Jamie Morris
Field Operations Manager, Morrison Energy Services
Overview
Morrison Energy Services carries out tens of thousands of Smart Meter home installations in UK homes every year. In London alone, a team of over 100 Smart Meter technicians install upwards of 80,000 Smart Meters each year.
For Smart Meter technicians, negotiating London’s congested streets can be a real challenge, with busy roads to navigate and often limited on-street parking availability near customer properties.
Morrison Energy Services partnered with AppyWay to trial the AppyParking+ mobile app. The app guides technicians to the nearest authorised parking spot to their job destination, taking out the luck and guesswork of trying to find parking. .
In the first year of using the AppyParking+ app, the number of aborted customer appointments due to no parking fell by over 30%. Technicians also praised the app as easy to use, helping them save an average of 5-10 minutes driving time and proving peace of mind over parking.
Challenge
London’s streets are a roman built maze of twists and turns. Morrison Energy Services’ 80 Smart Meter technicians have to navigate these streets and compete with residents, taxis, and delivery vehicles for the limited on-street parking available to allow easy access to their customers’ properties.
A key overriding objective for Morrison Energy Services was to reduce the number of jobs being rescheduled due to parking-related issues. The last few hundred metres of a journey are often poorly served by existing navigation and job planning tools. Limited parking availability, along with unavailable or unreliable parking information for unfamiliar locations, can mean that technicians are circling the streets around a customer’s property multiple times to look for a parking space, wasting both time and fuel.
These challenges complicate logistics and can result in a poor experience for the customer or even abortive visits, potentially leading to additional planning costs and regulatory fines for any non-attendance.
Providing enhanced parking information to its Smart Metering field team in London could clearly play a pivotal role in delivering an enhanced customer experience – with technicians arriving on time and far fewer appointments having to be rescheduled.
Outcomes
Technicians reported that the app increased their confidence in finding a suitable parking space. As such, parking came to be seen as a pre-planned activity rather than an end of journey inconvenience, reducing stress levels and significantly lessening the risk of aborted customer visits, parking fines and regulatory penalties.
The project also highlighted the value that driver aids can bring to field service employees, supporting the need to focus on a data-led strategy for optimising field operations.
The data shows:
- A 31% drop in the No Parking Abort Rate
- An average saving of over 20 Jobs per year for each technician using the app
- Sustained use of the app by all technicians, with an average of 100+ sessions accessed every week
Historical Analysis
| Date period | Period before app | Period after app |
| Jobs aborted due to parking | 76 | 50 |
| Jobs aborts due to parking that could have been avoided (where many parking options exist within a 5-minute walk) | 40 | 13 |
| Proportion of jobs aborted due to parking that could have been avoided | 66% | 33% |
By optimising technicians search for nearby parking location, the percentage of jobs aborted due to parking that could be avoided is halved, from 66% to 33%.
Parking in London without the AppyParking+ app is a nightmare.
Stuart Newton
Dual-fuel meter technician, Morrison Energy Services
Benefits
Increasing customer satisfaction
For end customers of the utility provider, needing to provide technicians with information on the nearest parking to their address and waiting for them to find a space is not part of a high-quality experience. Even worse, re-scheduling appointments because the technician couldn’t safely park can be a significant inconvenience for customers. Throughout Morrison’s Energy Services use of the AppyParking+ mobile app, the utility provider’s customers could rest assured that their technician had full visibility of parking near their home and they were able to search for suitable parking before setting off.
Improving journey planning and technician wellbeing
The AppyParking+ app provides a digital blueprint of all parking-related ‘paint on the road’. Based on search criteria (location, start time, and duration), drivers can access a quick and simple view of parking availability. The app reduces dependency on street signage and provides a platform for well thought out, pre-planned parking by enabling Morrison Energy Services field technicians to view accurate and relevant contextual parking information covering all options including resident bay restricted hours, single yellow line restricted hours, and paid bay maximum stay limits.
This enhanced parking information ensured that journey times were reduced, resulting in less fuel usage, lower carbon emissions and greater field operation efficiencies.
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Region
- UK & IRE
Employees
- 6,500
Services
- Water, Gas, Electricity and Smart Metering
