For small business success, listening to your critics is just as important as listening to your fans

Six years ago, Michael Back parked his car before attending a meeting, just like he’d done many times before. Although he paid for parking, his time expired before he was able to slip out and top up the meter, and so he returned to find a ticket on the windshield of his car.More than two million parking tickets were issued in Toronto in 2018, with fines topping $100 million, according to the city’s data, while 456,287 tickets were issued in 2019 and 398,095 in Calgary in 2018.

In 2013, Back enlisted a team of software engineers to develop a mobile app and e-commerce website for parking. The resulting company, Toronto-based Honk Mobile Inc., uses a cloud-based technology that allows drivers to search out, reserve, pay for and top up parking fees from a smartphone, tablet or internet-connected device.

He said another advantage Honk has is its habit of analyzing customer behaviour and paying careful attention to feedback for keeping it a car’s length ahead of the competition. “We noticed many of our customers parked in the same place time after time,” Back said. “So now we allow them to ‘favourite’ a location so they don’t have to look for a number or geolocate themselves.”

For example, “around tax time, we had a lot of people tell us it would be great if they could download their parking receipts for income tax purposes,” he said. Manually compiling a list of receipts to send to each customer would have required too much time and energy for Honk’s team, so they created a feature that aggregates monthly receipts.

Actually, for any business!

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