The value of customer experience feedback at fuel service stations (Part 2)

When you want to remove unwanted strain and negative thinking about your business, what do you do?

It has everything to do with your attitude towards customers and customers attitudes towards your business.

When you learn more about how customers experience your business and how you contribute to that, you open the way to pumping out engrained habits, mopping up spilled opportunities and calibrating customer friction points that bring you unwanted strain.

If you question why (and how) you would capture and analyse customer attitudes instead of reviewing volumes targets, turnover and cash balances, chances are, you don’t see or hear from your customers but see numbers: scores and averages that somehow indicate how good or bad your service is. In my previous article “The value of customer experience feedback at fuel service stations”, I highlighted a danger: by neglecting that there are human beings behind the numbers, you overlook that it is building relationships and trust with people that sustains your business.

True, numbers don’t lie, but they must ally! Ratios and net promoter scores provide useful information on the health of your business and often reveal positive indicators. However, they fall short in measuring how your service has influenced customers attitudes and provide no direction in which to knowingly attempt actions that would improve those attitudes.

Pleasing experiences create value and strengthen competitive advantage particularly when they touch individual customers during the core service cycle. This is so because we all want to re-experience pleasure. Conversely, motorists desert a service station for another when the purchasing experience is poor, especially in a market like South Africa which has moderate service station concentration and limited differentiation.

Service experience is personal; no two people can have the same. The memory remains with the individual customer who has been engaged caringly and professionally. It is more valuable therefore to capture feedback at the point of the experience and thereafter closely analyse to identify attitudes which highlight areas for improvement. The end goal is an action plan informed by real-time insights.

Your first step is to go with a committed partner who has an ability to marry your viewpoint with your customers’ needs by using technology enabled strategic insight. Outflow Customer Experience Insights (OCXi™) is that solution.

We have to date results from over 2000 service station visits in major cities in South Africa. The data continues to reveal the opportunities fuel retailers have to use CX feedback to create positive experiences that drive sales and increase loyalty.

Retailers sell fuel only and in 83% of the visits missed to engage customers about other service offerings. Overall, they continue to under-utilise their Loyalty offering: customers in over 1500 visits were not engaged on loyalty. There are however improvements noted in some brands since our last article in September 2019.

Service is fast in three of every four service station visits (74%). This is good and expected, however, is no reason to not to engage on or mention shop, carwash, coffee, etc. as was noted in eight of every ten visits made.

There are a lot more ways to influence attitudes than posters and give-aways! For profits to soar, you must do more. Act today and keep sorrows away, email info@outflowpetroleum.com to start changing your attitude towards your customers.