Since the pandemic, your customers have gone through a behavioural and societal shift. It’s time to adapt your service station to meet them where they’re at. That means transforming your business model, strategy, and branding to fulfil your customers’ needs and stay ahead of competitors in the fuel retail industry.
Improving the Customer Experience
Addressing major emerging trends in the market is key to improving the customer experience at your service station. The three most pertinent trends include:
- Evolving customer expectations
- New digital technology
- The increased presence of advanced mobility
Addressing Emerging Trends
Customer expectations are shaped by their experiences at other businesses. They expect your service station to understand their preferences and buying patterns and have personalised offers available. This personalised experience creates brand loyalty across the board, not just for service stations.
Loyalty programs are a useful way to make this happen. Customers can experience the rewards of such programs by visiting your service station and making purchases.
As for the emergence of new digital technology, your service station will fall behind if you’re not keeping up with your customers’ need for advancement. Up-to-date technology ensures that your customers’ experience at your service station is quick, simple, and seamless.
The rise of advanced mobility means that you need to transform your core offerings to accommodate diverse income pools. This way, you can reach as many customers as possible.
Building Resilience
To remain competitive, your service station needs to become more than a place where people top up their fuel tanks. You should be a one-stop shop of convenience for your customers, as this increases brand loyalty and patronage in general.
Adjacent income pools that your service station can take advantage of include adding a car wash, convenience store, coffee shop, quick service restaurant, parcel pick-up, and more. You can increase your profits by adding benefits outside of fuel purchases – it’s like the old saying: don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.
Spread out your assets. This way, you’ll please more customers and have a more dependable revenue stream. In the future, we won’t have petrol and diesel as the main reason customers visit our businesses.
That doesn’t mean that one feature should take precedence over the rest. Do the work in placing adequate focus on all your service station offers, from fuel to snacks to car washes and everything in between, to create a well-rounded, customer-centric experience.
To learn more about the ins and outs of running your service station optimally, contact us.