by The EnvisionaryA good user experience often comes in removing the pain points such as wait times, which is what this petrol station flow challenge was all about fixing.
Client: Woolworths Petrol (now EG Australia) Location: Melbourne, Australia Challenge: To reduce the backed up queues of cars waiting for petrol on inner-city rings and motorways/freeways
The Background
Despite Australia having masses of land and less than 25 million population, most people live in urbanised cities like Sydney and Melbourne. This led to certain peak times of traffic within these city centre and outskirts areas, and a few petrol stations (or ‘servos’) were being backed up onto nearly onto the motorway/freeway to the point of customers going elsewhere.
The aim was to conceive a better system around the current petrol stations layout. With surrounding businesses in petrol stations closer to the city centre, it wouldn’t be possible to just build outwards, so an efficient process would be needed.
Furthermore, the well-known brand of Woolworths wanted to preserve a reputation for good service but is predominantly known as a supermarket chain so its name often subconsciously invites people into the store to buy more.
Through research, we found that the extra sales they were getting through customers coming into the store were offset by the number of potential customers choosing to get their petrol elsewhere, such as Coles or BP. Often it wasn’t price that informed customer decisions but convenience, so we worked on developing a better system and user experience on the whole.
The Pitstop Lane Solution
The first solution was to concentrate on how to reduce the flow and backlog. Nobody wants to queue for petrol, especially after driving for so long. They want to just fill up and get going, or at least most do. A few might want to use a service station (servo) as a rest point for a bit, but that would depend on the size of the petrol stations area.
If the service station was only small then we would cut out the option for rest points completely – there just wasn’t room for it. If it was a large area then we created a choice on entry to the petrol station, a clear ‘store’ entrance, or petrol only ‘flow’ lanes (express).
When most vehicles enter a petrol station they tend to find the nearest free pump or queue behind a vehicle whose driver could well be searching for a magazine or a sandwich in the store, or queuing in the store trying to pay for their petrol. It seemed very inefficient.
We had to work on the most efficient methods so we tested different methods with chalked out lanes and stopwatches (at a closed petrol station) to see what would work the most efficiently.
We found that in most cases if someone was ahead of you in the queue then you’d often wait around and do nothing, which we found was the perfect time to open up the app (more on that in a sec) and set your payment fill option if you hadn’t done so already (we also played with the idea of getting a location-based notification as a reminder to fill up).
Whilst testing these ideas we came up with the ‘pitstop’ solution. We were busy timing ourselves trying to be faster and more efficient and found it quite fun. It made a mundane task more enjoyable and wondered if we could incorporate this into the solution.
We threw around ideas such as turning it into a race or having a pitstop count timer displaying on the petrol gage to encourage a faster fill up but were mindful of the danger of spilt petrol so we scrapped this idea.
Instead, I suggested a ‘slow’ and ‘flow’ lane idea. We’d already played around with how to make the available lanes faster but we hadn’t made one faster than another.
With the biggest issue to flowing customers being how most went into the store looking for something like a pack of mints (that they didn’t even want before getting petrol), we knew we had to encourage more customers NOT to go into the store.
Therefore, the pitstop solution ended up being about separating those customers who did need something in store, and those who didn’t. We turned to Mcdonald’s drive-thru for inspiration and set up two separate lane entrances 9the slow lane’ and ‘the flow lane’.
If you didn’t need anything then just simply drive into an express ‘flow’ lane and then simply tap your phone app to autofill a certain amount of petrol and then grab the pump and fill it up, get back in your car and once the payment is activated the bollard lifts up and you get on your way (you might also not have to get out of your car at all if the petrol station had an assistant to simply open the valve, add petrol, and close the value for you).
If you did want something then you would be directed to drive to a different area to ‘semi-park’ your car ‘behind’ the store. Here we toyed with the idea of just allowing customers to park up as normal whilst shopping but that would be wasteful if they wanted to get petrol too and then had to join the ‘flow’ lane, so we had petrol pumps that we only accessible to those who parked and exited a different way. (a future idea was to have petrol auto-filled at designated pump spaces whilst they are in store – like a car park space a bit like EV spaces today where you set the pump to fill with an auto-fill functioned petrol trigger whilst you are getting your bits and pieces).
The Other Solutions
We were clear on one thing other than efficiency, which was experience. Customers don’t like getting petrol, it’s a chore that people wish they didn’t have to do. In the future, we will likely just use EV charges at home a bit like how we charge our phone before we go out for the day, but the experience behind a service station is about convenience too.
After driving on a road all day people would want a drink or a pack of mints to keep them going, which is why we didn’t just cut out the store altogether and focus only on robotic flow lanes.
Instead, we wanted to help people with their needs at that point. If they needed rest then they could find a petrol station with enough ‘rest points’, if they didn’t want to get out of their car they could order what little snacks they needed as they filled up and find them ready to pick up at a window where they paid (like a Mcdonald’s drive-thru).
We wanted it to be quick and easy, and so we worked on a concept for an added ‘petrol’ section on the Woolworths app (a small petrol icon that could be activated by choice). When you click on the icon you can set up a petrol tab to use for future petrol (so you don’t have to worry about payment at the station but which automatically deducts money from your petrol tab, which you can fill up later).
The app section would also track petrol miles that could then be turned into store discounts (or a lucky scratchcard after each petrol spend over a certain amount). You would also have the choice to offset your carbon footprint (EV hadn’t really kicked off yet) and buy store items directly from the app to pick up at the window through the ‘slow’ lane.
The Outcome
Whilst not all concepts and research was implemented by Woolworths we did see the emergence of flow lanes through our pitstop initiative, and traffic queues substantially reduced at certain parts of the day.
Not all petrol stations could alter their limited entrance space but there were incentives made for going through the express lane in terms of extra miles used for store discounts in Woolworth supermarkets.
Since 2019 Woolsworth sold their petrol stations to EG Group, and whilst I no longer live in the country, I’m unaware of the current development of this research proposal. Whilst petrol is still very much used by the majority today it is fast turning into EV which is a changing focus of this think tank.
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