SITE OF THE FUTURE

Exploring a transformed forecourt experience with an innovative food offering

Quick Facts

Background

A British multinational oil and gas company wanted to understand use cases for a transformed forecourt experience - particularly a future food offering - and how this would align with their evolving customers needs. Research and recommendations were delivered to provide a strategy on how they could deliver this new experience.

Skill Areas

User Research
Research synthesis
Market Research & trend analysis
Ideation
Concept sketching
Stakeholder management
Innovative thinking
Collaboration

My Deliverables

Customer archetypes
Consolidated outputs of ideation sessions
Customer matrix based on research to categorise the needs of customer groups.
Detailed recommendations report on food offering ideas and how they could be executed.

The Details

THE CHALLENGE

For a long time a British multinational oil and gas company

saw a large portion of their profits come from customer use of their petrol and diesel filling stations. With the rise of electric vehicles and evolving customer needs they want to be more than a petrol station with a transformed forecourt experience. Exploration for the most valuable services they could offer and a clear strategy for execution was needed to give this client a view of the possible.

CLIENT

British multinational oil and gas

YEAR

2022 (12 weeks)

INDUSTRY

Energy

KEY GOAL

Deliver recommendations that details the direction for a transformed food offering as part of a forecourt experience.

MY ROLE

I was the Service design and Research associate tasked with taking a deeper dive into a potential food offering service as part of the transformed forecourt experience, mapping out what the experience would look like for customers and highlighting opportunities.

Some of the key deliverables within my role included:

Created discussion guides for customer interviews
Synthesised research outputs to understand the type of users that would see value in a forecourt food offering
Created customer archetypes based on research outputs
Ran stakeholder sessions to understand business ambitions for a transformative food offering
Carried out market research and trend analysis on food offering services
Completed a bespoke customer research matrix to map out insights to frequency of user needs and customer type
Ran ideation session with team on potential food services and evaluated session output
Mapped out use cases of favourable options and played this back to the client
Created an informative deck that detailed an executive summary, our approach, user needs, food offering concepts, use cases and highlighted opportunities for the client to implement.

UNDERSTANDING THE CUSTOMER

Many customers of electric vehicles require more time to charge their vehicles so they would like traditional stations to offer comfortable spaces while waiting for their cars.

I worked with the User Researcher to include questions that were specific to their food offering needs in the discussion guide. We learned that the customers who visited service stations as a stop off from long journeys - mainly motorway drivers - wanted an offering that allowed them to leave their vehicles and take rest in a different setting, while customers that hadn't had a long journey and only visited the forecourt to refill their vehicles wanted a food offering that allowed them to stay in their cars.

Our research informed the customer archetypes that were delivered along with the food needs based on the type of driver they were and what they used their vehicles for.

Consolidating the needs of all our customers confirmed that we needed a food offering that catered to an indoor and drive-thru type experience.

Meet Thomas

Thomas is an example archetype of the many developed within this project. Some of his behaviours to call out are:

He's an electric vehicle customer that drives everyday including family trips around the UK
He is tech savvy and plans his journey before making his way to a service station
He often stays in the car with family while it's charging

Some of these behaviours mean that his key needs include - service stations that are conveniently located, reliable and safe as well as food offerings that can be accessed quickly to feed his kids during journeys.

BREAKING DOWN THE PROCESS

A decision-making framework was used to keep everyone aligned with choices that were clear, met customer's needs and were tailored to the client's vision.

Had a kick off session with the client to understand their objectives, motivations and work that had already been completed on a transformed forecourt experience.

Carried out market research and trend analysis of emerging food experience trends that aligned with the client's goals. Used a benchmarking exercise to evaluate what similar businesses were doing as seen in yearly reports - this provided opportunities for differentiation.

Supported user researcher with discussion guide questions and session recruitment. Also supported with the synthesis of insights which informed research outputs.

Facilitated ideation sessions with the internal team and stakeholder groups based on research insights.

Evaluated session outputs to detail 10 initial concepts that detailed the offering and how it aligned with customer/business needs. These offerings went through a round of elimination within the internal team to decide on the strongest 5 options.

Worked with the service design lead to map out how these 5 concepts would work practically.

Documented ideas, use cases and processes for top 5 food offering concepts in an exploration deck.

TITLE OF THE CALLOUT BLOCK

LESSONS LEARNED

As a Service Design and research associate I worked closely with a Service Design Lead and a Lead User Researcher. Both team members equipped me with learnings that I went on to take onto other projects where I had a more leading role.

The importance of being proactive: It was clear from the start that this piece of work would spearhead more work in actually delivering our proposed concepts so it was important to be proactive - work with the client to lay the necessary groundwork so that ideas could be implemented.

Keep stakeholders aligned and manage expectations: Stakeholders had different personalities and ideas on what the transformed forecourt experience could look like. Confirming how each stakeholder wanted to be kept in the loop was key. Where necessary ideas were 'parked' for later and revisited to maintain valuable conversations.

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