Published on: 30 November -0001
As we enter the era of sustainable mobility, bp is organizing itself around its new purpose: to reimagine energy for people and our planet. With 20,500 bp retail sites worldwide bp is moving into a new world where people will be coming to bp to charging their electric vehicles (EVs). This could take between 20-40 minutes – very different to todays experience – creating the need for new offers and services. We talked to Nicola Buck, CMO at bp, about exploring new growth opportunities and scaling innovations
In the current environment, one of our customers’ biggest pain points is the need to queue when paying! To tackle this, bp set out to redesign the CX and introduced a series of digital solutions that enhanced our customer experience by allowing our customers to both pay for products in-app, thereby negating the need to queue, as well as delivering pre-order functionality for food and coffee, creating the ultimate “to go” experience. Once we had this pre-order and payment functionality, new opportunities emerged including the “what if I could order late-night snacks for my movie night, without even leaving my couch” concept … and so the Australian home delivery experiment was born.
“Nicola commented: “Surprisingly, this pilot concept revealed some interesting data points – we had a surge of orders for luxury ice cream – especially on Saturday nights! (10 pm orders of Ben & Jerry’s.) That’s the moment when our marketers knew they were on to something. All of a sudden the new opportunity of on-the-go food had opened up. The team quickly created an offer called “Couchfood”. Customers loved it! We were reaching our customers in a different time frame – early morning or late evening – making the growth opportunity absolutely incremental.”
bp’s retail network is perfectly situated to service communities. With retail sites on motorways, in cities, towns, and villages, 550 million customers live within 20 minutes of a bp retail site. In particular, during covid our retail sites and convenience stores remained open, ensuring many people were still able to have fresh milk, produce and even their dinner, delivered to their homes. To drive rapid scale, bp has entered into a global agreement with Uber, a company that has shared goals for putting the customer first.
Nicola said: “As marketeers, we were curious about customer behaviour – how do new offers impact existing buying patterns? To our delight, we found we were appealing to new customer missions and therefore the delivery offer was highly incremental. Digitalization actually boosted sales in the shop. Of course, digital sales are data rich. By combining our own sales data with the Uber data, we found insights on popular products that helped shape our customer offer. Now we can run experiments in a digital world to see if customers respond. We have developed at pace and can make decisions based on consumer behaviour”.
Inspired by Nicola Buck, IRG Participant 2022, SVP Customer Value Proposition and Experience at BP
