Redesign the service station so that the customer chooses it, not just tolerates it

The challenge:

A service station has an underlying problem that few companies dare to name: the customer does not go because they want to. He goes because he needs fuel. And when you no longer need it — because the car is electric, because it charges at home, because urban mobility no longer passes through the pump — the station stops making sense.
One of the main energy companies in Spain, with a network of hundreds of stations in the territory, commissioned us to rethink its relationship model with individual customers. The challenge was not to improve the app. It went deeper: why should a customer choose this station in a world where fuel is less and less the reason for stopping?

The approach:

We started with exhaustive field research: 104 direct observations at our own and competing service stations, 22 interviews with customers at the time of refueling, 9 interviews with station managers and dispensers, 25 shadowings with customers between 25 and 55 years old, and 93 online questionnaires. We also visited retail references from other industries: Apple Store, Santander's Work Café, Pangea, Huawei—to understand how other sectors had reinvented the face-to-face relationship with the customer.

The insights that emerged from the research defined the direction of the project. The urban customer adapts refueling to his routine, not the other way around: he stops by because he is on his way, not because he has planned the visit. The perceived experience doesn't measure up to the spending — filling up the tank is one of the most impulsive spending times of the month, and the experience rarely recognizes it. The loyalty program with its own card worked poorly: customers who had a Carrefour or Mastercard card were more loyal to the network than those who had their own points card. And there was no recognizable brand experience: each station was experienced as a different place.

With these learnings, we organized co-creation workshops with real clients, with retailers and with thirty-two people from different departments of the company: marketing, strategy, network, technology, image. We also explore future scenarios: how the role of the service station changes when the majority of cars are electric, when charging times create a twenty-minute wait that does not exist today, when urban mobility fragments into scooters, bikes and shared vehicles.

The proposal was organized into three lines of action. First, a new data-driven benefits system: moving from a model of cards and forms to a model that recognizes the customer through their interactions — their payment method, their visits, their spending patterns — and offers them value based on what really matters to them. In this context we evaluated license plate recognition as an identification technology invisible to the user, but we ruled it out: the data protection regulation (LOPD) did not allow it without explicit consent, and obtaining that consent destroyed the advantage of the seamless experience we were looking for. Second, a new form of frictionless payment: inspired by self-checkout models already established in other sectors — supermarkets, restaurant chains, IKEA to eliminate the checkout line as a breaking point in the experience. Third, a premium service model: transform the employee's role from cashier to assistant, freeing their time from collection tasks to dedicate it to generating real value for the client, following the model that already worked in sectors such as technology or banking.

At the same time, we develop service concepts for the context of sustainable mobility: the station as an aggregator of scooters, bikes and carsharing cars; the coworking area as a value proposition for electric charge waiting time; smart lockers as an e-commerce collection point; offering real food as an alternative to impulse products.

The result:

A complete customer experience strategy — with its three lines of action, its phased implementation roadmap and its concept prototypes — validated with real users and with the company's internal teams.
The project demonstrated something that was not in the initial briefing: the energy problem was neither technical nor supply-side. It was a relationship model. The station had enough services to be relevant. What he lacked was a clear criteria for what type of experience he wanted to be for his client and the strategic design to build it.