Becoming customer-centric: The new mindset of fuel retail innovators

The fuel retail market faces a number of disruptive threats that are spurring massive change and a relentless focus on customer experience.

Kelly Brown explains why fuel retailers are shifting their focus from the vehicle to the customer, and how to remain relevant.

Three forces of disruption are changing the game for the fuel retail business: the rise of alternative fuels, emerging mobility models and sky-rocketing consumer demands for digital and personalised services. 

While global demand for fuel will continue to increase over the next decade, this growth is not sustainable. The traditional fuel industry is on borrowed time: energy demand is expected to plateau around 2030 as the world shifts to renewables, and traditional sources of revenue will eventually evaporate and profitability dwindle.

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How are fuel retailers innovating to survive?

The most innovative fuel retailers recognise that to unlock new business models and revenue streams they need to shift their focus from the vehicle to the customer.

Historically, fuel retailers have been focused on fuelling and servicing vehicles. While they also sell snacks and convenience goods to consumers in stores, the business is still centred on the vehicle, not the driver or walk-in customer.

In addition, fuel retailers have relied on convenient physical locations - “build and they will come” - rather than on inspiring their customers to visit them.  Some have effectively given their customers (in the form of data and opportunities for relationships) to third party loyalty and payments providers, and to the brands they sell, like Coke.

The future business of fuel will be less vehicle-centric, and more focussed on the customer. 

Today’s consumers expect brands to deliver fast and frictionless experiences through compelling interactions across all physical and digital touchpoints.

For fuel retailers, that means re-imagining the customer experience to become the place that people want, rather than need, to go to. It’s about becoming a neighbourhood hub, with more of what customers want. And it’s about extending your relationships outside the service station with digital channels and partnerships. 

The fuel retailers that fail to recognise and seize this opportunity, will be the businesses left behind.

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What steps can you take to revamp your customer experience? 

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Here’s a two-pronged strategy that will help offset the future decline in traditional income streams

1. Lock in your customers now 

Focus on the end-to-end needs of your customers and revamp the customer journey to expand your relationship beyond quick visits to service stations.

That means enabling fast, digital, contact-free purchases, transforming your convenience stores with new products and services, and personalising your customer communications, offers and experiences. To do that you’ll need to create true omnichannel experiences that seamlessly integrate physical and digital channels to create an array of engaging customer experiences using your own brand, in conjunction with the third parties' customers value.

Case study: Our client Z Energy replaced a third party loyalty scheme with its own loyalty strategy and programme. Pumped is now Z’s cornerstone for innovation, with the ability to deliver the unified and personalised experiences its customers expect.

2. Embrace complexity to build new capabilities

To revamp your business and aggressively embrace innovation and new technologies, you’ll need to develop new expertise and capabilities. That will introduce more complexity into your organisation, with sales channels becoming less physical and more digital. 

You’ll need to embrace agile working to innovate and get products to market faster. You’ll want a retail platform that connects your physical and digital channels to let you deliver customer experiences that go beyond the novel to become meaningful. And by using APIs, you can create an ecosystem of partnerships to deploy new apps, services, channels and devices. 

Case study: Z Energy is transforming its business to pursue growth opportunities and deliver award-winning customer experiences, including a world-first innovation – a virtual fuel tank called Sharetank.

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If you’d like help to create immersive, seamless and personalised customer experiences across all physical and digital channels, get in touch. We’d love to help you develop a unified customer journey.

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Moore Wilson’s partners with Bridged IT for implementation of new Infinity retail management system

Iconic food emporium Moore Wilson’s has selected IT integrator Bridged IT for the transformation of its retail system. Triquestra’s Infinity unified commerce platform will be installed as Moore Wilson’s point of sale in stores, and create a hub for the brand’s customer experience and innovation in the future.

Moore Wilson’s will benefit from a modern retail management system that streamlines processes, improves access to information and allows the business to deliver personalised and seamless experiences at every touchpoint.

Founded over a century ago, Moore Wilson’s is a family-owned business beloved by chefs and the food obsessed. Built up around the foodservice and hospitality industry, it includes everything from fresh produce, meat, fish, breads and general grocery through to hospitality, kitchenware, toys, food, beverages and pop-up food caravans.

“Our point of difference is our face-to-face customer service,” explains Amanda Thompson, General Manager of Moore Wilson’s.

“We know who our customers are and we always strive to do things better, whether it’s the products we stock or the service we provide.”

Following a competitive review, Moore Wilson’s selected Bridged IT to deploy and support Infinity.  “Infinity is one of the few platforms able to accommodate our diverse business model, with both retail and wholesale customers requiring multiple volume breaks and bulk purchasing. And Infinity’s New Zealand presence gives us an out-of-the box solution with local capabilities that can be customised to our requirements.”

“We appreciated Bridged IT’s appetite to understand our business from the ground up,” Amanda says. “They have a collaborative approach that gives us access to their entire team and have robust conversations to establish clear goals.”

Amanda says Moore Wilson’s goal is to remain relevant and unique and continue to offer an outstanding customer experience.

“Infinity’s efficient point of sale and improved product management will allow us to provide exceptional customer service, and the right products at the right times.”

Infinity will provide opportunities to capture information on customers and add value to Moore Wilson’s popular loyalty card and rewards programme.

“Infinity will also give us the ability to tailor how, when and what we communicate to customers and then respond to their feedback and requests quickly and efficiently with accurate information.”

Gurjit Singh, Director at Bridged IT, says: “Moore Wilson’s has a remarkable brand heritage, with strong core values and an inspiring company culture. It has set the standard as a shopping destination for the food obsessed. We’re looking forward to helping them transform their retail operations, and then supporting Moore Wilson’s across its next 100 years of business growth and innovation.”

Moore Wilson’s transition to Infinity is targeted for completion in 2022.

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If it’s time to upgrade your point of sale to one that will scale and adapt to shifting consumer expectations and new technologies, contact us.

Three things to consider when implementing click–­and–collect

This story was originally posted April 3rd and updated September 1st 2020

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Global COVID-19 restrictions have brought forward e-commerce growth by up to ten years and mandated focus on health and safety.

Whether you’re improving your existing service or introducing it as new, click-and-collect is a smart addition to every retailer’s fulfilment toolkit as consumers move online and demand contact-less fulfilment options.

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Click-and-collect lets you continue selling and getting your in-store goods into consumers hands, and it takes the pressure off warehouse deliveries. 

In the current environment, click-and-collect can also help ensure staff safety because you can set things up to be contactless. 

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Here are our top three things to consider if you’re thinking about implementing click-and-collect:  

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1. Business process and social distancing

To optimise physical distance between your team and customers, set up an alert and collection system. For instance, when an order is ready, contact the customer with a specific time to collect - a good platform will enable you to automate this process. And set up a designated safe zone where customers can wait for store staff to bring their purchases to them with minimal contact. 

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2. Keep a check on service levels

Choose a unified commerce platform so you have a click-and-collect dashboard that updates in real time and can be monitored from anywhere, including while your sales manager is working from home. It should provide an all-of-business view of sales and fulfilment and automatically alert the right people when a sale may not be able to be fulfilled. So you can tell customers right away, arrange for stock to be transferred from another store, or offer delivery instead. 

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3. Make it consistent and easy across all channels

There’s so much changing for retail reps right now, including different processes that are mandated by retailers and by the government. Keeping the in-store process consistent and easy will reduce stress and errors.

In Infinity, orders from any channel are processed in the same simple way by your in-store team – whether the sale is made through your call centre, a mobile app or your ecommerce site. One consistent process saves time, reduces errors and frees your team up to focus on your customer rather than the transaction.

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I’d be happy to discuss click-and-collect in more detail and answer any questions you have about getting it up and running. Contact me here or through LinkedIn.

Infinity helps Liquorland get click-and-collect ready for lockdown in less than a week

At the beginning of New Zealand’s COVID-19 Level 4 lockdown, liquor stores closed because they weren’t deemed an essential service right away. That didn’t stop the Liquorland and Triquestra teams from working together immediately to get a tuned up click-and-collect service ready for reopening in Level 3.

Brett O’Hanlon, Liquorland’s Finance and IT Manager says, “We had new click-and-collect functionality built, tested and running within a week to make sure that everything would be as efficient and contactless as possible for store staff and customers.”

Infinity’s flexibility and the collaborative effort has resulted in a click-and-collect process that’s delighting franchisees and customers alike. And the quick action has transformed click-and-collect from the smallest Liquorland ‘store’ to helping run the turnover of around 129 stores.  

Scott Bishop on building a customer-focused innovation culture at Z Energy

This story was originally published on 21 January 2020 and updated in May 2021

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One of the biggest challenges retailers face is a lack of an innovation culture. They know they need to keep pace with new technologies and changing consumer demands, but are unsure about how to embed innovation and make it an ongoing process.

Back in early 2020, I spoke with Scott Bishop, then the Chief Innovation Officer at our fuel retailer client, Z Energy, for his insights on how to explore, identify and build inspiring customer experiences. At that time, Scott led Z’s Innovation Refinery which has produced many new experiences for customers, including two world firsts in only two years – Fastlane and Sharetank.

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You have an impressive background leading innovation efforts at Amazon, Air New Zealand and now Z Energy. What is the Innovation Refinery and why was it set up?   

SB: The Innovation Refinery team is our catalyst for innovation at Z Energy. We’re a small team of designers, researchers, creatives and builders tasked with identifying customer pain points from across the business, building solutions and iterating with our customers.   

The Refinery is also our creativity space. It’s a physical area in our Auckland office accessible to everyone at Z and has five distinct zones that provide the space necessary to inspire, create and involve customers in our ongoing customer experience experiments.

We set it up because we're at a crossroads within our industry and believe demand will slowly fall over the next 20 years. This fall in consumption is driven by a number of trends, including New Zealand's commitment to a carbon-free future and new choices being made by consumers, such as the move to fuel-efficient cars and electric vehicles.

We don't want to wait for that to happen. Our goal is to be a long-term, sustainable Kiwi company. So participating in a declining market doesn't fit that definition of long-term and sustainable.

We also realise that we're no smarter than anyone else and it will take us a while to figure out how we can get out of transport fuels. And so we're going to start now and experiment our way to the future.

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What are your goals for the Refinery and how does it support Z’s transformation?

SB: We have two main roles at Z: coach and build.

We spend around 50% of our time coaching and mentoring across the company because we believe innovation isn’t just done by one team, it should be done by everyone. We help to accelerate new products and services, as well as process and productivity enhancements by showing and encouraging people towards new ways of working. 

The other half of our time is spent building next generation products and services. They can be internal, external and even small things, like innovating a process or even a spreadsheet. It also includes supporting our key investments including electric company Flick and transport company Mevo. 

These new products and services also help us demonstrate this new way of working. Having artefacts, stories and actual products and services we can point to helps reinforce the ongoing coaching and mentoring we do.

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Why is a dedicated physical space for innovation so important?

SB: Creativity requires space. And creativity also requires movement. 

If you think about a traditional corporate environment, every time you finish a session you have to clear the meeting room and all that momentum and all those ideas are lost. It just kills the process.

And it’s scientifically proven that your brain changes with movement and you unlock more creativity. 

So we have a dedicated area designed with space for movement and space for people to keep artefacts up and return to over the weeks or months they work on a concept or idea.

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What are some examples of innovation projects you’ve led?

SB: We take a portfolio approach to our investigations. We've got five different time horizons, or categories, that our innovation projects fall into: Fix, accelerate, incubate, investigate and challenge.

Two of the most recent acceleration projects we’ve launched are Fastlane and Sharetank – both we believe to be world firsts in our industry. 

Fastlane lets our customers buy petrol using their number plate. They never need to touch their phone, wallet or credit card. Our computer vision technology uses our existing on-site cameras combined with payment technology to allow customers to simply arrive, fill up and leave as quickly as possible.

We launched Fastlane in 2017 with nine trial sites, and now we've got 42 across Auckland and are expanding to other major metros across Aotearoa. We’re also experimenting at four sites with pay-by-plate across all lanes to determine the best customer experience.

Sharetank, a virtual fuel tank for New Zealanders to pre-purchase fuel, is another first. Launched last October with our partners Triquestra, Rush Digital and Invenco, customers can now prepay for fuel when the price is right for them. This fuel is stored in their virtual tank that they can access any time they like and even share with up to five friends and family.

We believe it is a competitive differentiator and there is intellectual property in this so we have applied for patent protection in New Zealand and the US. If the patents are granted, then we’re able to license the patent to other companies and generate incremental revenue for Z.

Both projects aren’t ‘done’. They’re in market and we’re getting customer feedback to help us keep enhancing them.

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You mentioned that Z is looking for new markets beyond fossil fuels. What are some of your projects in this space?

SB: Our future market projects are all in the ‘investigate’ and ‘challenge’ portfolio categories and focus on three areas: Future fuels, mobility and last mile services.

Future fuels include bio-diesel, electricity and hydrogen. Mobility is about the electrification of existing and new transport options. And last mile is all about how we use our proximity to customers as an asset. With our nationwide network of over 350 Z and Caltex sites, 82% of New Zealand’s population lives within five kilometres of one of our locations.

Last mile is about leveraging the proximity to our customers. It may have nothing to do with selling fuel, such as click-and-collect hubs, co-working facilities and micro-warehousing. Courier companies are very inefficient, with vans making multiple trips each day from warehouses or airports to deliver items in CBDs or communities. It’s not efficient from a time perspective, not good from a carbon perspective and not economical from a fuel cost perspective. So we could potentially provide 350 micro-warehouses in every community across the country.

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How do you generate your ideas? 

SB: All of the ideas already exist in the business or in our conversations with customers so my team doesn't need any domain experience. We're just about identifying, prioritising and accelerating them.

Each of our three core lines of business – commercial, retail and supply – has a strategy lead. We stay connected to them as the subject matter experts in the business and they feed ideas from their sets of customers into the process.

In addition, we do a significant amount of research on consumer trends. How are consumers changing, how is technology changing, how are attitudes and behaviours changing? We then figure out if those changes are relevant to our business. 

Thirdly, we keep a finger on the pulse of our customers and employees, partners and retailers. Anyone can submit an idea into the process to be prioritised.

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With so many great ideas from so many sources, how do you prioritise them?

SB: We do an ongoing analysis of all these opportunities using three core criteria: Economic value, strategic value and customer experience value. 

So, for example, one idea might have a significant amount of strategic value. It could be good to help build our brand or support one of our core businesses or, for example, leap-frog our competition. So it might be selected even if it doesn’t have any economic value.

It’s a very different approach to most corporates where you just take the economic numbers, stack and rank, then take the top three and go after them. It’s about focus on lifetime value of customers, not near-term business performance.

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What’s your advice for retailers wanting to embed innovation in their business? 

SB: There's nothing really ‘new’ in anything that we’ve created, even from an ideas perspective. We focus on our own interpretation of Design Thinking, Lean, and Agile. It’s really just about three things: Customer centricity, experimentation and iteration. 

Having said that, there's no company that we're aware of that does it quite like we do. We’ve taken the best of what we’ve seen that's most applicable to Z and created something that is unique for us.

A lot of innovation labs are semi-independent. They hire or free up people to work in a decentralised operation and only integrate them back into the business once the idea is fully executed. 

Whether it’s internal or external is a philosophical question and there’s no right or wrong model. I'm personally not keen on the external model because of the difficulties it creates bringing it back in, with many ventures having a lack of accountability, ownership and clear transition paths. 

We believe in a centralised model. You've got to solve the challenges of internal antibodies or process problems that stifle or kill off ideas. That's why we spend 50 percent of our time actually working alongside the business, not just building new products and services.

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Want to find out how Infinity can provide you with a platform for faster experimentation and iteration of new customer experiences? Contact Victoria Crossfield at victoria.crossfield@triquestra.com

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More Infinity innovation stories 

Loyalty case study: how Z is boosting sales and repeat visits with Infinity

Z Energy has been using the Infinity unified commerce platform since 2015 to manage more than 80 million annual sales across 350 Z and Caltex retail sites, as well as in 100 commercial sites.

This case study shares how Z is now using Infinity for its new Pumped loyalty programme to create more compelling offerings for customers, build a competitive advantage and lower customer acquisition and retention costs.

Andy Stewart, Owner of Site Systems Platforms at Z, explains that the launch of Pumped was a huge success: 

“The transaction volume and number of new customers created were unprecedented. Week on week, we have continued to increase our loyalty volume within the Caltex network.”

Dan Coffey, Z’s Marketing Strategy Manager, says that its new  loyalty solution is just the beginning: 

“Infinity is the cornerstone of our future innovation and Pumped has the ability to go much deeper than the first iteration we’ve delivered. We’re looking forward to using our new platform to give our customers valuable rewards that keep them coming back for more.”

It’s the small things that make a big difference in retail

I recently joined Triquestra as Key Account Manager. I have more than 20 years’ experience in sales and marketing across vendor management, business planning, implementing go-to market strategies and partner development. 

My big focus here is customer experience, which got me thinking about what makes me choose one brand over another and how I can help my new clients lead the way in loyalty. 

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It’s not just what you want to sell but how you want people to feel

I fully believe that it’s the small things that create customer loyalty and keep me, as a consumer, coming back for more.

I was visiting a friend and she served a chipotle mayonnaise that was delicious. After searching in various supermarkets, I was unable to find a bottle. I reached out to my friend who gave me a website to try. I found it and decided to order three bottles while I was at it.

When the package arrived, to my surprise, the fourth compartment held a free bottle of mushroom sauce which was equally as yummy and which I will definitely be purchasing again.

Although a pointed, persuasive sales message is important in winning customers, it is the subtler and smaller appeals that create real loyalty and in turn repeat business. 

Instead of focusing only on what you want to sell, consider how you want people to feel. The customer experience is a critically important driver of emotional connection. An emotionally connected customer will buy more of your products and services, visit you more often, exhibit less price sensitivity, pay more attention to your communications, follow your advice, and recommend you more – everything you hope their experience will cause them to do. 

This emotional connection is something that I have grown to expect. I have a wallet full of loyalty cards and my phone is loaded with apps – some belonging to the clients that I look after here at Triquestra. I am always excited to see personalised offers, redeem my points and be treated in a way that makes me feel valued. 

I make my purchasing decisions based on these good experiences, and in turn, I consciously decide not to shop at companies that don’t make an effort. Multiply me by all the shoppers out there and you see how you have to things right from the start.

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Building those opportunities to wow

In my conversations with Infinity clients, we talk about optimising the end-to-end customer experience – every aspect of how customers interact with their brands, products, promotions and service offerings, on and offline. I’m looking forward to helping with both the big picture and the little things that will maximise customer value and build that emotional connection. 

If you want to build a better loyalty programme and get closer to your customers, contact us and we’ll work with you to make that goal a reality. You can also find out more about Infinity Loyalty.

In retail, change is still the only constant

Hello – I’m Scott Lewis, Triquestra’s new Sales Executive. I recently joined the TQ team after working for a 3D company, where I was responsible for launching and selling interactive software across Australia and New Zealand.

Prior to that, I spent 10 years working in the telco sector across marketing, channel sales, partnerships and B2B direct sales. My past retail-related experiences have taught me how consistency across all channels is now the key to the future retail success.

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It’s been an interesting few years

Only a few years back, in go-to-market meetings at the telco, multiple stakeholders from across the business would discuss how we were going to launch the ‘latest and greatest’ smartphone coming to market (you can probably guess the one I’m referring to). 

There was the usual debate around stock allocations between channels and which partners would commit to which volume, and who would get the lion’s share of the marketing co-op budget etc, etc. But then there was also the question of how to drive more traffic to the website so the retail stores didn’t get inundated, particularly in launch week. Because of course we wanted everyone to have a good customer experience. Hang on, what? We don’t want customers going to our stores?

Were we heading down the path where our website or app was going to replace the traditional retail store? Yes, I could see the cost benefit – less rent, staff, monthly trade marketing change-outs, the list goes on… But were we sure that consumers were ready to stay at home and do all their shopping on the couch or from their phone rather than go to the malls and high streets and speak to real people? 

The answer was ‘no’ then, and it still is. Recent studies back this up and challenge those who predicted that retail would go through a paradigm shift to being 100% online. Today in Australia, online shopping is responsible for only 9% of total retail sales. In the US, it’s 10%. While those numbers are set to rise, the in-store expertise is still highly valued.

Australia

United States

Obviously some people are more than happy to order online and wait for the courier or mail. But many want to go to a store and see and touch items before buying. Get face-to-face advice. Have things fixed. Want to physically compare X with Y. Browse for a gift when they’re not sure what they want.

So where to next?

It’s such an interesting time for retail – as well as an amazing opportunity. And the Triquestra team is passionate about complementing the best parts of the traditional brick-and-mortar experience with the online experience, so that regardless of how or where a client’s customers prefer to buy, their  experience is consistent, tracked and personalised to their needs and interests. Especially as we all know that you have one shot to get it right and begin earning customer loyalty, or shoppers will go elsewhere. 

I think it’ll be no surprise to any CIO that to deliver a great front end experience, the back end infrastructure needs to be robust and can adapt and integrate with the plethora of apps and systems that are fast coming to market and re-shaping the retail landscape. 

It’s being part of this technology innovation, combined with sharing the success stories and learnings of our clients that I am looking forward to the most. How they’ve adopted a unified commerce approach within their businesses and how we were able to help them navigate the technological change in order to better anticipate the future needs of their customers – regardless of where and how they choose to shop.  

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If you would like to know how we can help you embrace change and offer exceptional customer experiences, I’d be happy to help out. After all, as they say – change is the only constant.