To be competitive in the petrol and convenience industry, you must innovate. Petrol stations can no longer rely on traditional business strategies to grow their businesses and must innovate to stay ahead of the game.
Moving Towards Innovation
Generating new ideas is how you stay relevant. Here are five ways to move towards innovation at your service station.
1. Foster the Culture
To encourage employee participation, foster a culture of innovation. This means pushing to try new things, along with adapting and learning to new situations. In a business culture that values and rewards ideas, your employees are more likely to think outside the box.
2. Collect Ideas and Explore
The most common starting point for collecting ideas is a challenge – maybe a new piece of technology, unmet customer needs, or a product issue. From this challenge, your team can find ways to solve it. To encourage this, you can:
- Place a whiteboard in a common space where employees can leave ideas
- Set up an idea box where employees can leave their thoughts
- Hold a town hall meeting devoted to discussing problems and solutions
You can also get outside input from customer feedback, conferences, an advisory board, or consultants.
From there, choose the most compelling ideas and explore the results.
3. Get Creative With Testing
The last thing you want is to spend too much time and resources on something that won’t end up flying with customers. Find out ways to test the idea without actually going through and building it – at the end of the day, there’s a difference between what customers say and the actions they’ll take.
4. Proceed to Implementation
As you implement, consistently review the idea to make sure it lines up with what customers want and need, and be open to making tweaks as time goes on.
Keep an open mind and realise that many of your ideas won’t achieve the results you expect, so have a process to help decide when it’s time to abandon the idea. Abandoning an idea doesn’t mean you failed, though. It’s a great opportunity to learn.
5. Track Your Performance
Here are a few KPIs that you can track throughout the process:
- Number of ideas that come from employees and customers
- Percentage of employees that come up with ideas
- Percentage of ideas that make it through to implementation
- Revenue generated from new ideas
Just make sure to avoid overanalysing your ideas without implementing them.
Innovation At Your Service Station
Constant growth ensures that your service station remains relevant to your customers and in the market. If you want to run some ideas past us or need some inspiration, contact us.