Video: GAS crafts personalised customer experiences to grow loyalty

GAS is one of New Zealand’s largest independent fuel retail networks. Following its blistering-fast implementation of Infinity point of sale software, the retailer is now capturing customer data to develop a distinctive experience and boost loyalty.

Watch Nahid Ali, GAS General Manager, describe how GAS can now develop cluster- or even site-specific offers that let site owners take advantage of opportunities in their local areas.

Nahid explains:

“Infinity has opened the door for GAS head office and GAS retailers to a wide variety of marketing tools that we've never enjoyed before.”

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Interested in how GAS only took 10 weeks to deploy Infinity POS nationwide?

Watch GAS modernises fuel retail through fast point of sale deployment.

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If you’d like help to create tailored customer experiences that boost loyalty, get in touch. We can help you seamlessly integrate physical and digital channels to create a unified customer journey.

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New guide: Why cloud edge is the new battleground for retailers

Retailers have turned their attention to the store to create the unified commerce experiences consumers now expect across the entire buying journey.

They’re blending physical locations with digital channels and using technologies such as AI, AR, VR and IoT to create new value through frictionless and dynamic interactions. 

However, it’s a challenge to give these latency-sensitive, data-intensive applications the performance and speed they need with a traditional central cloud or data centre. Uploading and downloading data takes too long. And it requires expensive infrastructure and network bandwidth. 

That’s why cloud edge is a game changer. By enabling connected devices to process data closer to where it’s created, on the edge, it ensures the customer experience is truly ‘zero-friction’. 

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Our new guide, The retailer’s guide to cloud edge: Why cloud edge is the new battleground for retailers, explains what edge computing is and why it matters, what’s driving adoption and the benefits it delivers, with retail use cases and architecture considerations.

It’s been written for technical and non-technical audiences who want to create lightning-quick ‘phygital’ experiences that cut costs, delight customers and grow revenue. 

DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE

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Want a taste of what’s inside?  

Watch Mike Baxter, Triquestra’s CTO, as he explains how edge computing works and why it’s important for rich retail experiences.

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3 ways Liquorland is crushing inventory management

Liquorland is one of New Zealand’s most successful, sustainable and responsible liquor retailers. With Infinity providing unified inventory, POS and fulfilment, the retailer has added over $100 million in sales in only four years and grown its market share 5 percent - a massive result in a mature market. 

We interviewed Brett O’Hanlon, Liquorland’s Finance and IT Manager, and Andrew Barr, Owner Operator, for insights into how strong inventory management helps to drive profit and sales. 

Many retailers struggle to create a single view of inventory across all locations, but Liquorland is one of the few that has mastered it. Watch the retailer explain how it uses Infinity to reduce costs and optimise its range, delighting customers with personalised experiences that convert.

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1. Optimising store ordering, merchandising and marketing 

How do Liquorland stores achieve results four times ahead of industry average growth? Brett and Andrew describe how unified commerce helps ensure Liquorland is “match fit” to pursue its ambitious growth strategy. 

Andrew explains:

“Infinity has helped us manage inventory by letting us understand what's selling when and where. This allows us to access cash to invest in products that will help enhance the customer experience.”

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2. Flexible pricing and promotions 

Brett explains how Liquorland now gives all 130-odd stores “sovereignty” over their own local promotions, while also participating in powerful nationwide offers.   

And to ensure a unified customer experience, all the promotions are available on the ecommerce site:  

Video: Unifying the CX via flexible pricing & promotions

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3. Forecasting demand to match customer needs 

Andrew says that delivering better cashflow starts with better demand forecasting. 

By having data available across the business, he can build heat maps to predict how much of a specific product customers will want to purchase during key periods of the day or week. That ensures he has the right stock on hand and the right specialist staffing for his customers’ needs. 

Video: Liquorland improves cashflow through better inventory management

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For more on how Infinity supports Liquorland to offer new omnichannel services, read: Infinity helps Liquorland get click-and-collect ready for lockdown in less than a week

Want help to unify your inventory? Contact us to find out more about how Infinity can give your business an accurate and single view of inventory.

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New in Infinity – August 2021

Here are the latest enhancements we’ve added to the Infinity platform to help you create the frictionless experiences your customers expect.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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INFINITY APIs

Extend product pricing options 

The Products API now offers greater versatility when determining prices. Previously, users could select Price1 at the Head Office or an alternative (eg Price8) at a specific site. Now the API returns all prices set up from Head Office (when left blank) or all prices set up for a specific site (when the site code is supplied). So, for example, you can use Price8 at the Head Office to produce a single global price for a product.  

Faster troubleshooting following database error 

The Cloud Events Service now stops on a fatal error. Previously, it only logged an inability to connect to the database and when the maximum retries were exceeded it entered a state where the service was still running at the Windows level, but it wasn't doing any work. Now, if the service fails to connect to the database for more than the configured retries, the Windows service will stop, allowing OS level monitoring to raise alerts and perform recovery operations.  

Easier sales to non-debtor customers  

Using the Infinity pricing engine and pricing conditions to price a cart on a web store then pass the resulting sale to Infinity is now simpler when selling to non-accounts receivable customers for integrations that use Infinity APIs. Output from the Infinity Carts API can be used as input to the Invoices API with only a few additional pieces of data added. Previously some manipulation of the accounts receivable account code was required for non-debtor customers.

More control when retrieving price change records 

The Product Price List API has been enhanced to allow a consumer of the API to retrieve recent price changes while also specifying the maximum number of records to return. This enables the consumer to control how many records to receive at once and tune application performance.  

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Customer online orders now visible at POS

POS users can find and view online orders on the POS Sale screen. This offers a more seamless experience for both the customer and the POS operator, for whom there is no distinction between an order the customer made online and an order placed at a physical store. 

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PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Easier parent-child items adjustments

Infinity now allows you to automate parent-child items adjustments. With just a few steps, you can assign a new parent item to existing child items with no need to manually perform stock on hand and cost adjustments.

Increase control over point of sale refunds

Using the Returns Extended module you can now define if a particular item is refundable or not, giving retailers the ability to prevent particular items from being refunded at the point of sale.

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Increase personalised customer promotions

The Infinity Rules Based Pricing interface has been enhanced to allow retailers to create and maintain customer-specific promotions that could previously only be maintained via integration. This allows you to create more personalised promotions and enhance customers’ purchasing experience.  

Allow staff to apply discretionary total sales discounts

Infinity Rules Based Pricing now allows you to manually apply total sale discounts to all items in a sale, including items that are already part of a promotion. This enhancement gives your staff more discretion when it comes to offering customer discounts; for example, when the customer signs up for your loyalty program.

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POINT OF SALE

Allocate refund items to correct location

POS users can now assign items to a specific location using the Returns Extended module. This enables more accurate and less time-consuming stock adjustment. POS users are prompted to allocate the item to the correct location at the time the goods are returned and are not tempted to keep the item to the side for location details to be entered later. 

Give customers summaries of epay transactions on a receipt

You can now print more than one epay transaction reference on a receipt. This means that if a customer buys more than one epay product it is easier to query the epay system and resolve any potential problems by easily identifying the items in the sale.  

Increase accuracy of cashout transaction records

POS receipts have been enhanced to display the word "Cashout" instead of "Change" when an operator processes a single EFTPOS transaction with a cashout, thereby providing a more accurate record of the transaction. If the transaction was a split payment, the word "Change" will not be replaced even if the cashout was part of the transaction.  

Provide staff with information when Wishlist provider unavailable

POS operators are now given more helpful error messages when the Wishlist provider is unreachable or the Wishlist service name is invalid. The length of time your system will wait to receive a response from the Wishlist provider can be configured, and the POS operator will be prompted when the timeout is met, allowing them to communicate more effectively with the customer when the Wishlist isn’t available.  

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MESSAGING

Easier management of bulk emails

Infinity Messaging can now send a configured number of emails per minute only. This enables retailers whose email service limits the number of emails per minute to automatically send a large volume of emails, such as monthly debtor statements, in managed chunks.

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TECHNOLOGY

MESM RPB SQL Runner is now .NET 4.6.2 compatible and does not depend on installation of .NET 3.5 Framework on the target PC.

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

New in Infinity – May 2021

Here’s new functionality across the Infinity platform that will help you and your team deliver the frictionless experiences your customers expect.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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INFINITY API

Better management of products sold 

The Products API now supports an expanded range of Infinity’s standard product management functions. The additions increase control over the selling of certain products, to ensure that business rules can be met and the correct products are selected while processing transactions. 

 You can use it to define and view: 

• The sites where a product can be sold.   

• The date range between which a product can be sold. 

• Whether the product must be the only product in a transaction. 

• Whether each unit of a product must be on a different transaction line. 

• Whether the product can only be paid for using certain media. 

 Make future product changes 

The new Products Planned Changes API allows you to take advantage of Infinity’s batch updates function to make changes to products that will take effect at a future date and time. Customers whose master product details are managed in systems outside Infinity can use it to create, overwrite, retrieve and delete future-dated changes. 

 Offer multichannel payment options 

Infinity Sales Orders API now supports websites sending payments for existing orders. Customers can pay for their in-store orders online, giving them more flexibility when managing their orders and offering a seamless purchasing experience.  

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INVENTORY

Tailor labels printed for stores 

Infinity Labels now allows retailers to change the order that labels appear on screen, meaning you can print labels in the order that makes sense for your store layout. For example, you can decide to sort labels by description rather than by SKU. 

Easier de-allocation of stock from locations 

Finding items to de-allocate from a location has become easier and less time consuming now that stock items that are listed alphabetically on the Items Location screen, are also listed in that order on the De-allocate screen. To reduce errors and increase accuracy when de-allocating items from locations, Infinity can be configured so that all items are deselected by default and users need to select the items that are to be de-allocated. 

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Tax-free items retain status throughout order process 

Infinity can now process tax-free sales orders from creation to completion. Items logged as tax-free through any channel will retain their tax status throughout the lifetime of the order. 

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Increase promotion options for branches 

Businesses that use branch clusters in conjunction with rules-based pricing can now configure Infinity to add items to pricing groups and promotional rules even if those items belong to a higher level cluster than the local branch, or belong to no cluster. This gives you greater flexibility in the promotions you can offer your customers. 

Remove inactive items from searches for more accurate promotions 

The Rules Based Pricing item search experience at the Back Office has been improved so that users no longer see a list of search results that includes inactive items when they are creating a promotional rule or adding items to a pricing group. This ensures that the correct products are added to promotions and prevents confusion when unexpected products are listed. 

Increase the number of discount options you offer customers 

Businesses that use customer discount groups as a way to group customers can now use these discount groups to create pricing rules for the TRADE condition type when using the standard rules-based pricing procedure. This extends upon the existing customer category options already available so that a customer can belong to two different groups, with pricing rules able to be defined for each.   

For example, a trade customer can receive a standard discount because they are a gold-tier customer, as well as discounts on a particular range of products because of their business type and discounts on a set of products that they have negotiated directly because of a piece of work they are doing. 

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POINT OF SALE

Deliver staff reminders more frequently 

You can now update the reminders your store staff see throughout the day so that they keep pace with the changing needs of your business. Until now, reminders would be updated only when users started up the POS. Now when you add a reminder at the Back Office or Head Office, it will load at the POS when the operator logs in and after a transaction is completed.  

Control the visibility of branch stock levels 

Multi-branch businesses that include standalone outlets can now prevent those outlets from seeing stock levels at other branches, allowing you to maintain branch confidentiality across your organisation.  

Tailor the way you view search results 

You now have a greater choice of how you view Advanced Items Search results at the POS. Instead of viewing search results as thumbnails you can now choose to see all results in a list, which is useful when dealing with numerous results. You can also customise the columns listing the search results and the search criteria in a way that makes sense to your business and add search filters for these columns. 

Improve visibility of cash positions in stores 

If your business uses MESM Cash Management, you can now use it to receipt cash from the bank for your float and deposit cash in the bank, giving your Back Office staff an easy way of recording these transactions. You can also keep on top of your current cash position by seeing the amounts at all cash drawers as well as in the safe at a glance. 

Increase control over returns refunds 

The Returns Extended functionality can now prevent POS users from editing the unit price when completing a returns transaction if they do not have the authority to do so. If the unit price needs to be changed, the operator will need to get permission from a more senior staff member, thereby helping to prevent incorrect refund amounts from being given. 

Give customers BP fuelcard payment option 

If you are a New Zealand fuel retailer using PC-EFTPOS, you can now offer BP fuelcard as a payment method, allowing you to add more customers to your customer base.  

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ADMINISTRATION

Increase security by increasing password strength 

Access to POS, BOS and HOS can now be made more secure through the use of password policy complexity. When implemented, your users must create strong passwords with at least three different types of character (they can use upper and lower case letters, numbers or special characters). 

More control for head office when closing branches 

You can now disable branches centrally from Infinity Head Office, allowing you to: 

• Reduce the reliance on manual tasks when closing a branch. 

• Gain greater control and flexibility when it comes to branch management. 

• Shut down a branch more quickly, safely and efficiently than ever before. 

Your staff have to be specifically given permission to do this, meaning that admin users can enjoy greater control over branch management while other users cannot accidently close a branch. 

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TECHNOLOGY

SQL 2019 users will no longer get a "Login failed for user error" when the correct SQL user and password are entered. This applies for the following scenarios: 

• When upgrading Infinity and the SQL user connecting to the database is not the standard Infinity SQL user. 

• When the Infinity SQL user already exists, you are installing Infinity again and the correct SQL password is supplied during installation. 

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

Three ways to revamp the fuel customer experience

With demand for traditional fuel expected to plateau around 2030, fuel retailers are urgently innovating to replace shrinking revenues and dwindling profits.

The leaders have quickly moved to improve and expand their traditional products and services and launch in new, but related, market segments. They recognise that the future business of fuel will be less vehicle-centric and more focussed on the customer. They’ve developed a customer-centric mindset and are building new skills and capabilities to compete with unfamiliar competitors.

We’ve seen some impressive transformations. The retailers making the first move are creating differentiated experiences for competitive advantage and forming strong customer relationships that are driving up conversions and profits.

It’s an immense undertaking. 

While fuel retail has always been challenging – very fast service is non-negotiable, transaction volumes are high and operations typically run 24x7 – this requires a fundamental transformation of the standard business model.

And customer expectations have never been higher. Today’s consumers expect brands to deliver fast and frictionless experiences through compelling interactions across all physical and digital touchpoints. Building customer loyalty requires a complex mix of emotional and rational factors that enable you to connect and build relationships with customers across all your channels and communications.

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So where should you focus? 

Here are the three actions you can take now:

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1. Enhance the purchasing experience

Create a seamless experience across the end-to-end ordering and purchase journey, with personalised offers and incentives to encourage store visits, and fast point of sale transactions on the forecourt and in stores.

• A mobile app will let your customers pay for fuel without leaving their vehicles. Don’t restrict it to payments - use the app to help customers find their nearest service station, view their purchase history, accumulated loyalty points, discounts and rewards, pre-order coffee, convenience items or a carwash.

• Some retailers are making payments fully contactless with license plate recognition systems where customers essentially pay for fuel with their number plate.  

• By identifying customer pain-points and aggressively embracing innovation, our client Z Energy has delivered a world-first in fuel retail with the launch of its virtual fuel tank - Sharetank. 

2. Transform the convenience store

The convenience store format is ready for change. Consumers are cutting back on big weekly supermarket shopping trips and choosing to purchase more of their groceries at easily accessible local stores.

• Become a neighbourhood hub by expanding beyond traditional c-store offerings into high-quality products and fresh food, and design places customers want to visit, rather than need to visit.  

• Increase sales and create new profit streams by giving your customers a variety  of delivery models, such as click-and-collect and home delivery.

• In highway locations, encourage customers to stay as long as they want, with in-store and takeaway food, and rest areas for travellers.

• Consider the un-manned store model, which reduces costs while offering customers a quick, digital experience. 

3. Personalise customer offers and experiences

Historically, fuel loyalty programmes were ‘earn and burn’ type rewards that provided discounts for future spend and effectively gave away customer data and relationships to third party loyalty and payments providers or consumer brands. 

• You have a fantastic opportunity to reclaim ownership of your customer data from a variety of channels and touchpoints – ranging from fuel selections to coffee preferences and grocery purchases within stores. 

• Analyse these customer preferences and develop personalised communications, experiences and offers that go beyond the novel to become meaningful.

• Use AI tools to include personalised recommendations in e-receipts and during click-and-collect pick-ups. 

By anticipating your customers’ needs and showing that you know and understand them, you’ll drive up conversions, increase revenues and boost loyalty.

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If you need help to create exceptional customer experiences, get in touch. We can help you seamlessly integrate physical and digital channels and create your unified customer journey.

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Connecting, engaging and delivering: unified commerce’s top benefits

A single retail management platform positively impacts your entire business in so many ways.

1. Simplify your technology

A single commerce platform gives you a leaner and more flexible architecture to deliver greater agility, increased efficiency and more control. By centralising data and systems you can expect many IT efficiency improvements, including:

• Scalability: third parties can easily plug in, building the ecosystem of retail software, tools, resources and devices you can add and change to match your business needs.

• Accuracy: exposing data and functions (rather than moving and replicating them) reduces integration - improving efficiency, decreasing errors and increasing accuracy.

• Easier to maintain: the single centralised platform reduces the need for reconciliation and manual processes to maintain and manage data and functions, and there is only one system to secure.

• Reduced costs: reduced maintenance, management and integration of data and systems decrease your overheads.

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2. Accelerate speed to market

These improvements in IT efficiency and flexibility let you meet business demands faster and innovate much more quickly. There’s less work required to plug in and implement new functions across channels, test cycles are reduced, and you’ll use development capacity more effectively. Teams currently tied up in building and checking integrations can be moved onto more innovative, customer-centric initiatives.

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3. Optimise inventory and availability

Your most significant benefit will be increased sales generated by ranging and fulfilment capabilities that enable you to sell products across channels (and even sell products not normally stocked within any channels).

With a single view of stock across all locations, plus the ability to easily move it around the business, you’ll reduce your inventory costs and overall stock requirement. And by giving customers a range of purchasing and fulfilment options, you’ll enhance your service and increase customer satisfaction.

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4. Boost in-store productivity and sales

You’ll benefit from lower shipping costs and increased sales when your ‘click-and-collect’ customers pick up their purchases at stores, with research showing nearly 50% of users bought additional items when picking up purchases.

Foot traffic has declined, and store closures are increasing. By arming your staff with extensive product details and providing shoppers with experiences that entertain and entice them to linger, you’ll enhance customer interactions, improve staff productivity and ultimately increase conversion.

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5. Mobilise and personalise your customer experiences

The ability to see each customer’s shopping preferences and history across all channels is critical for building personalised shopping experiences.

With a holistic view of your customers, you’ll be able to better plan your pricing and promotion strategies and get the right offer or message to the right customer, at the right time and right place.

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6. Use data for business insights

One of the most compelling benefits of unified commerce is the value that comes from using all the centralised data to obtain insightful or actionable information and have it available when and where it’s needed.

A single, unified platform gives you the ability to view all customer touchpoints and react to potential issues in real time. With a single source of truth and powerful analytics, you can turn large amounts of data from disparate sources into insights that help you to attract and engage customers in new ways, and improve your bottom line.

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For more on unified commerce and why it’s the future of retail, download this free ebook. 

GET THE FREE EBOOK

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Start your journey to unified commerce. Get in touch

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New in Infinity – April 2021

The latest enhancements across the Infinity platform to help you and your team work more efficiently and create frictionless customer experiences.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Extend visibility of orders to branches and regional managers

The Order Orchestration Dashboard now has a read-only mode available at branch or head office level. This extends the visibility of orders to additional staff, giving them the ability to view but not update orders. At branch level, only orders within the region of that branch can be viewed. A regional filter at head office gives regional managers an overview of orders within their region.

Easier edits to orders during picking

It is now possible to view and edit an order from Pick Manager.  This simplifies the process of managing an order if there are any issues during the picking process, freeing up time and making it more likely that an order is updated correctly.

Better management of delivery and pickup times

When an order for collection has been picked via Pick Manager, it is now possible to prompt the user to enter a delivery or collection date and time.  This enables stores to schedule preferred times for the order pickups, for example, during non-peak trading times. The customer should be contacted to discuss the scheduled pickup time. This update also gives stores more information for managing their orders.

Easier selection of preferred suppliers

It is now possible to prevent a supplier from being automatically assigned to an order line for one or more branches. When enabled, the supplier is instead selected by the branch that will fulfil the order line if the order line cannot be fulfilled from store stock. This ensures that the store that fulfils the order line makes an active decision about where to source their stock and means that the supplier selected is more likely to be the best for that specific order in terms of cost or time to deliver.

Improve data integration with external systems

When adding or updating a sales order, non-printable characters entered into the order notes will no longer be saved to the database. This limits the risk of sales order integrations to external systems failing due to un-recognised characters and reduces the time spent correcting these issues. 

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PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Faster selection of products

For companies that sell non-barcoded products, or services with various options that can be selected, a new mode of the Infinity Options and Links product selection wizard allows you to navigate through the available options to select an existing product. This makes it easier for staff and customers to understand, simplifying the transaction and reducing time. It also allows you to analyse sales to find the most popular options selected and use this knowledge to update and improve the options available and drive more sales.

Easier management of duplicate barcodes

When managing item master data imported and exported to/from spreadsheets using Infinity ETL, it is now possible to import items with duplicate alternate barcodes.  This sometimes occurs when suppliers re-use a barcode on a different product. This new option frees up time spent adjusting data so that the barcodes are unique and the import is successful.

Improve data, stock and reporting accuracy

A new validation prevents child items from being re-activated unless the parent item is active.

Faster price updates

The Inventory Review module allows branches to choose whether to apply a recommended retail price change or to keep their own price.  For companies who use this module, entering price updates at head office is now faster due to recent optimisation of this module, freeing up some of the time spent administering data.

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Better visibility of promotions and pricing options

New functionality helps users to upsell during a promotional period or when there is different pricing for an item at higher quantities. This function shows the user when Pricing Scales or Product Sets are applicable to the current sale. An indicator can be configured to appear on transaction lines where these pricing options are available and staff can click a button to view further details. 

Improve POS scanning accuracy

When a survey notification prompt appears on the POS screen and an item is scanned, Infinity no longer closes the prompt. This means that staff will not accidentally miss scanning an item into a sale, thinking that they have already done so, reducing revenue loss and improving stock accuracy.

Prevent unintended updates to pricing conditions

Infinity head office users can no longer create pricing conditions for their cluster for a promotional cycle that belongs to a parent cluster. This means that if a promotional cluster is updated, there are no unintended updates to pricing conditions at a lower cluster level.

Faster repricing

RBP Engine has been optimised to reprice large quantities of items with quantity breaks instantly. Repricing is now faster, creating  a faster customer experience.

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POINT OF SALE

Give customers Openpay payments

Infinity can now accept payment by Openpay in Australia. Openpay is an online and in-store payment solution that lets customers purchase now and pay later, with no interest. 

Reduce queue times with new search capabilities

You can now configure a POS button to call an advanced item search for a particular department, sub-department or class only. This is useful for quickly finding products of a particular type that are not barcoded at the point of sale, reducing queue times.

Another new feature is useful for quickly finding commonly sold products that are not barcoded. Advanced Item Search can now be configured to automatically show the top 5 selling items on opening.  If Advanced Item Search has been restricted to a particular department, subdepartment or class, then it will show the top selling items from that department, subdepartment or class. 

Enhance Slyp digital receipts

The Slyp Integration has been enhanced to enable better matches to EFTPOS transactions and now Australian retailers who use Linkly (formerly PC-EFTPOS-AU) can use Slyp to deliver Digital Smart Receipts to their customers' banking app.

Add VDMS vending machines

Infinity is now integrated with VDMS vending machines. Infinity can check the inventory levels in the vending machine and disallow a sale if there is not enough stock.  It can also check whether the vending machine door is open and disallow a sale if it is. Upon completion of a sale containing a VDMS product, the product is automatically issued from the vending machine. 

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INVENTORY

Faster generation of purchase orders

The performance of automatic purchase order creation by date range in Infinity has been significantly improved, which frees up time spent waiting for purchase orders to be generated.

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TECHNOLOGY

The Infinity Cloud Events Service can now publish heartbeat and sale transactions events using the Cloud Events v1.0 standard format either via Rabbit MQ or via cloud-hosted API.  These events can be used to integrate sales transaction data to other systems, for example, analytics, electronic marketing systems, financial applications and alerting systems.

The Infinity Cloud Events Service heartbeat processor now states whether the back office and/or station database connectivity (linking) is healthy or not. If its unhealthy, it will list the back offices and/or stations that are unhealthy.  This information can be used to raise alerts if a branch is not linking.

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OTHER

When viewing and searching for invoices using the Invoices API, you can now retrieve fuel sale and fuel discount information.  This is useful for providing this information to other third party systems, such as enabling a customer to view their transaction details.

The configured Maximum Sale Value can now be set to a decimal value. This feature helps support controls related to Anti-Money Laundering legislation, where businesses need to complete a series of person checks if the sale is $10,000.00 or more.

For companies with a large volume of transactions, it is now possible to schedule a task overnight to purge data older than a given number of days from the head office database rather than using the standard Infinity database clean-up which is not run at a scheduled time. If a company wishes to reduce the length of time that data is kept in the head office database, then this process can also be used to incrementally reduce the number of days of data held in the database, without having to reduce the data lifespan parameter each day. 

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

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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