A statement from Mr Will Smith of Growth & Partnerships at JustPark

During a conversation I had with Mr Smith yesterday, I offered to publish an explanatory statement concerning the MOT reminders that JustPark were sending to their customers, if he put one together. 

He emailed this statement to me a short while ago. Here it is.

will.smith@justpark.com	18:47 (27 minutes ago)		Reply
to me

Hi Lucy, great to talk yesterday, thanks for sharing more insight to your experience, it was really helpful for me. Here’s a little summary of what we talked about for you to publish on your blog – I appreciate that. Hope you have a great holiday. Will

 

 

“My name’s Will, I work for JustPark. After reading Lucy’s blog above I had the pleasure of talking to her find out more about why our reminder hit the wrong note with her and to answer her questions about how / why we’re doing this. Here’s a little summary of what we talked about…

 

From talking to many of JustPark’s drivers, the same insight keeps surfacing – owning a car is supposed to be a symbol of freedom, but the reality is too often the opposite – strict rules, expensive bills and hassle.

 

In response to this we launched our Driver Care Platform in Autumn 2020 which aims to take away a little of the pain of owning a car. The first thing released under this platform was MOT reminders.

 

Why did we decide to do this?

Further research revealed 53% of our drivers worried about remembering their MOT date (Lucy obviously isn’t one of them though!). Separately it was in the news in March that 11% of UK drivers are actually missing their MOT due date by over 3 weeks – risking a £1,000 fine and 6 penalty points. From this, it felt clear an MOT reminder would be useful. We also discovered that 34% of our drivers didn’t have a good relationship with a local garage – they worried about being overcharged for work on their vehicle. So we decided it would be even better to help the people worrying about choosing a garage to find a good one. To do this, we partnered with a business who independently curate a list of trustworthy garages – the garage must have a great customer review rating to make the list, and will get removed if they fall below that standard.  

 

How & why do we have MOT dates for our drivers?

Our contracts with several Local Authorities and large car park operators require us to confirm the vehicles we are presenting for parking are road legal: have a valid MOT. So when a driver adds a vehicle to their JustPark account we automatically look up the publicly available MOT date with DVSA. Given we already have this data, we thought it would be good to put it to use for our drivers.

 

Do our drivers like this?

We have 5m drivers – it’s really hard to do something new that 100% of them will love, but we don’t want that to stop us trying to add value for them. We’re working hard to exclude people like Lucy who don’t find the reminders helpful, but it’s difficult to predict at scale which drivers these are. We run an always-on satisfaction survey to check how the reminders are received. It didn’t hit the right note for Lucy. But from 1,000s of responses we’re averaging 4.3/5 rating – which reassures us we are doing something useful here. We’re also continuing to work hard at getting that feedback score even higher and keeping the Lucys of this world happy. Which is why I’m so grateful to her for her feedback and insight which we’ll be using to make improvements.

 

Thank you, Lucy!

 

Will Smith, JustPark.”

 

 

 

Will Smith

Growth & Partnerships