Interested in repeat business?
When studying successful businesses, people will say that to be successful one needs to provide a consistent level of service. Many will use the example of McDonald’s. Regardless which location one enters, the service and product will be the same, which is what makes visitors return consistently to the franchise.
However, consumers today want more than a consistent level of service. Let’s be clear, you will need to provide a high level of service and quality to attract customers to your car wash, gas station and its convenience store operation. There is no getting away from that. Only to keep them coming back consistently, service is just one part of the customer experience and journey.
What matters most is understanding who your customers are and what their buying habits are: It is only with such customer data that one can create services and programs to drive repeat business.
Tap into POS and CRM data
Understanding one’s customers better is not hard to do today. In fact, a well-operating car wash, gas station and/or c-store is likely already gathering customer information through one or a combination of sources: Point of Sale (POS) and the Customer Relations Management (CRM) systems, as well as loyalty and subscription apps. These collect a large amount of actionable customer information, from basics, such as names and email addresses, to buying habits and in-store and service spends.
“From a marketing standpoint and a data standpoint, the more data they can gather on their [customer’s] transaction and their own interactions with the customers, a business can start to do such things as targeted messaging and targeted marketing, for example,” says Nicola Hill, marketing director with SIR Solutions, a provider of point-of-sale solutions, to Canadian retail operators. “So, if you have a customer that comes and regularly washes their car with you, you can begin using the information you have to start marketing to them a car wash on a regular basis, and from there to start encouraging them to come through your convenience store doors.”
Analyze patterns
The goal of collecting such information through CRM and POS systems is to understand who one’s customers are —their buying habits, spending, etc.—and to create targeted campaigns that are meaningful for them, and which will incentivize them to return to your business. This is why it is important that an operation begins to collect customer information, even if, at first, it is only a person’s name, email and phone number. That alone is enough to start building a relationship.
“In today’s competitive landscape, it’s more critical than ever to collect customer email addresses and phone numbers so you can
communicate with them,” says Taryn Chmielowicz, vice-president of marketing at DRB Systems. “But those pieces of information are most effective when you marry them with P403-991-6568OS data about customer trends— split of retail vs. membership washes, popular packages, repeat visits, offers they’ve accepted or declined, etc. These insights not only help you deliver more timely and relevant messages to your customers, but also unveil opportunities to enhance the consumer experience to drive more retail loyalty and membership conversions, while reducing membership churn.”
The challenge a car wash, gas station and its convenience store operation will face is getting people to provide that information first, even if it is just an email, phone number and name; and more crucially later, consenting to providing more information to drive membership and loyalty programs that enhance the customer’s experience and loyalty.
“Normally, customers are not going to give their information away for no reason,” Hill says. “They are sensitive about their personal information. So, you must have some incentive for them to share that information, such as a promotion or offers that you can provide to them if they take part in a loyalty program. As an example, if you join the loyalty program, you will get a free or discounted car wash offer, regular promotions and discounts to other services or offerings.”
Get personal
Don Frieden, president and CEO of P97 Networks, a provider of secure, cloud-based mobile commerce and digital marketing solutions for the convenience, retail and fuel industries, has spoken often of how today’s technologies around POS and CRM systems are evolving to create more personalized communications. When it comes to loyalty programs, for example, the need is to evolve so that they interact with a customer in a way that feels ‘personal’ to them.
That is, when a customer gets an offer on their loyalty app for their local car wash, gas station or favourite convenience store, that offer reflects who the customer is.
That comes about by taking all the information one gathers from customers—from their personal information to their buying habits (such as what times they come into car wash operations, do they use the car wash after they purchase gasoline or buying something in the convenience store)—and tying offers and other services to that customer’s information.
For example, if your customer comes every three days to purchase gasoline and on one of those days adds a car wash, an offer that will be most meaningful to them would be to offer a premium car wash when they come to purchase gasoline; or to make the offer as they approach the pump or as they are pumping gasoline. This can only happen if one takes customer information and uses it to truly understand the customer and behaviour, thereby making an offer likely to be acted upon.
Success story
Frieden gives the example of one of his company’s clients, a global energy brand that has an existing loyalty program and loyalty mobile app, but wanted to extend that loyalty program and application to bring more customers into its car wash in Canada.
“They wanted to do a subscription car wash program and integrate it into their system and wash controllers so that a customer could go use their car wash at any of their about 350 locations,” he says. “They did not want it to be restricted to a single location.”
The company used the customer information it had already gathered to get people to sign up for its subscription car wash program and added an online payment process for car washes to make using the service easier and faster. “It was set up like the subscription service that you see with Amazon Prime or Netflix and what they found was that once people got onto the model, they came more frequently to the car wash. And, once they were using the service, they could push offers and other programs to get them to come back more frequently and tie very targeted customer offers to have them come into the convenience store to purchase something or help move them to the fuel side of their business.”
Frieden says that by tapping into customer information and patterns, the company was able to drive more people—up to seven times more—to take on the car wash subscription offering.
The service had another benefit, and that was it drove more traffic into the other parts of the business, being the fuel pumps and its convenience store operation, he adds. “They were able to generate the customer insights needed to drive targeted offers and then influence the customer’s purchase journey by incentivising the customer to make those purchases.”
Powerful results with LPR tech
“With the combination of a sophisticated POS, fully synced marketing automation platform and License Plate Recognition (LPR), you can create powerful, personalized customer experiences that lead to increased membership conversion, reduced churn and retail revenue growth,” says DRB’s Chmielowicz. “Once you’ve captured critical
information about your customers (namely contact and vehicle information), you need LPR to track the behaviour, visits and purchases made by that individual customer. From there, you can orchestrate extremely powerful customer journeys. If you know that a particular customer has visited the wash three times already this month, you can deliver a specific membership offer to incentivize them to try a membership and save money. These personalized, tailored offers can be delivered onsite at the POS or digitally through targeted text and emails.”
The result? Creating a win-win for customers and the bottom line.
