Delivering Realtime Digital Experiences with the Esso Pay Mobile App

at UXDX Community: Ireland & UK. Video: https://youtu.be/LZk6qSXbcbc

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and topics

[00:00:00] Hi, my name is Mike Darabotter [?]. Thanks for listening today. Today I'm going to talk about delivering real-time digital experiences with the Esso mobile app. I'm the director of product management at Fiserv. This talk is about some of the challenges I've experienced while working with the Esso mobile app in Europe.

[00:00:24] For the past two years I've been working with ExxonMobil in rolling out this app across several countries in Western Europe. The app allows users to pay for fuel using their mobile phone, using an Esso-branded app. You can see more on the YouTube link. The traditional consumer journey around purchasing fuel has been very fragmented, and I'm going to touch on that in my talk and explain how Esso envisaged the mobile app would improve that customer journey and consumer experience with fuel purchasing.

[00:01:04] Some of the topics I want to talk about would be how we create our customer journeys and our UX designs, and how some of the technical considerations impact our product development. Also we'll look at how field testing is a key component of rolling out a product such as this, and some of the data and analysis tools that we have to help us track metrics and user feedback and see what's going on on the ground when we go live with a new app version. And I might briefly touch then on what the future might hold for our product and also the industry, and where things are going. There are some interesting anecdotes about running products like this, so hopefully you find it useful.

[00:01:58] My background: I'm going to give a quick introduction to myself. I've been working here for two years at Fiserv, and my background is in UX, working with designers and developers, cross-functional teams, web and mobile apps since 2006. I was head of digital experience at OpenGL [?] previously, and also worked for a number of years at Travelport Digital when it was a mobile travel technology startup. Prior to that I had my own startup, which was called Tricycle Interactive, which I co-founded and worked at for six years. I also have a master's in interactive media and in product management.

[00:02:45] Before I get started, this is the product that I currently work with at Fiserv. The name of the product is Universal Commerce, and they call it here the "on the channel conversation" [?]. There's a link provided below if you'd like to find out more about that product, but through this talk you'll see the kinds of use cases and scenarios that this product supports and the value it can deliver to customers.

The traditional fueling experience

[00:03:16] I'm going to do a brief introduction to set the scene. The traditional customer experience for purchasing fuel, as you probably know yourselves if you've got a car that runs on fossil fuels (obviously we all want to move to electric vehicles as soon as possible): you drive your car, you see the indicator getting low, and you look for the nearest petrol station you can find. You pull in, fuel your car and pay, and get a little paper receipt like this. That's typically how most of us purchase fuel in Europe at the moment.

[00:03:58] It's very commoditized, and it's not the most engaging experience or memorable experience. You probably wouldn't even know, if somebody asked you, which station you fueled at or which brand it was. It's not something you really think about. When we were working with ExxonMobil, which is one of our key clients in Fiserv, they had done a lot of analysis, and you can see I've provided a snippet here from a customer journey mapping exercise across what it's like for users and where there are friction points. They decided that they needed to do something about this, so I'm going to touch on some of the key findings before we get into the mobile app itself.

[00:04:45] Some of the main issues that are problematic with the current fueling experience in the market for the customer are these. It's not easy to find a preferred service station that has the amenity that you want. It's quite fragmented, because between purchasing fuel at different stations from different brands, you end up with papers that you throw in the bin, so you don't really ever know where you've been. You don't have any record of it, or any analysis you can do yourself to see what your spend patterns are like, which I think people are more conscious of nowadays as more and more experiences become digitized.

[00:05:32] Also, the customer is not recognized. The brand doesn't really seem to care about you when you've fueled from them over and over. You could be anybody, and it doesn't seem to matter where you go, so that's not great from the customer point of view. And then of course waiting to pay can be an issue. In busy cities around Europe, with pressure on the service station, there can be queues and so on. Hygiene becomes an issue with COVID, so it can be a problem in certain locations where the fueling experience can be quite a slow process to get the payment done. Not that many pumps have payment enabled for chip and PIN at the actual pump in some of these markets; it varies across Europe.

[00:06:24] For the brand, then, of course there are some major issues from the marketing perspective: there's no engagement with the customer, the brand doesn't know who their customers are, and there's no differentiation against other fuel brands out in the market or other products. Also, there's no way to measure the effectiveness of marketing, because you don't really know how effective your marketing campaigns were. You've done direct marketing with no ability to close the loop on a marketing campaign or an offer. Those are some of the major issues that the ExxonMobil marketing group were facing, so that's where this came from.

The Esso app

[00:07:06] The next slide is the actual Esso app from the app store. The concept was to bring in a mobile app that solves for some of these issues and then enhances the consumer experience when purchasing fuel, fueling your car. It's a simple enough concept to understand, and it's one we can all identify with. Most of us drive cars that take either diesel or petrol fuel, and we've all paid for fuel, so it's something you could probably easily relate to.

[00:07:40] I have a short video here, hopefully it'll play okay, a screen recording, to bring it to life a little bit. This is the dashboard. You have a start fueling button in the center, and you've got a connected Nectar loyalty account for earning and redeeming points. You select your pump, and in this case you can scan the QR code. The camera will open and the user scans physically at the pump, which is a nice integration if geolocation doesn't work. And Apple Pay is integrated, so it's very easy with an iPhone, for example, to automatically use that.

[00:08:31] The next step then is to authorize the payment, so the pre-authorization happens for security purposes, and then you start fueling your car. To shorten the video, you get to complete the transaction, and then you'll see at the end you end up with the receipt. The paper receipt was the only artifact you probably would have ended up with in the current experience. So it's a much more engaging experience: you've got your transaction history and you've earned your loyalty points, compared with traditionally.

User journeys and the real-time problem

[00:09:06] That's the Esso mobile app, so hopefully all clear so far, just setting the scene really. I want to talk then about how we developed that and some of the challenges faced in rolling out this app in different markets. This is a user journey documentation that we created for the fueling flow for the app. There are lots of different decision points where different flows can be accessed, depending on what the user's action is and what the reaction of the system is to the user.

[00:09:43] It's a simple artifact, but we do have a process around that. It's not the basis for my talk today, but as you can imagine, we followed the general methodologies you would in creating mocks and prototypes and getting user feedback, and working with cross-functional teams and experts to get the requirements and the designs right, so that we can build new features and roll them out. That's a simple point.

[00:10:17] That's all very well, but as Mike Tyson once said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. The analogy there is it's nice having good user journey designs, but with a real-world product like this, it's not like when you're selling ecommerce products that get delivered three days later, or digital products. The problem is the person is there with the car and they're trying to fuel the car. They may already have fueled the car, and if something goes wrong with the experience, you've got a real-time situation to deal with.

[00:10:54] There's no time to recover that you might have when you're purchasing a ticket for a concert or a flight, or if you're purchasing clothes to be delivered. There's the time between the purchase and the actual fulfillment when you can recover from any issues that might happen behind the scenes. But in this case there is no opportunity. The person is physically at the station, they may already have put the fuel in their car, and lots of different things can happen.

Anecdotes from customer care

[00:11:27] Some of the kinds of things that can happen at scale are some interesting anecdotes I'll share with you verbally today. How we find out about these issues is through customer care, customer feedback feeding back through (inaudible). For example, there was Wi-Fi at a petrol station, and all the people who would arrive at the station would connect to the Wi-Fi. It was a well-established Wi-Fi provider across the UK, but they didn't really realize that their phone was proactively connecting to the Wi-Fi. So the second they arrived at the station, they were on the Wi-Fi, but unfortunately at one of the stations this Wi-Fi had stopped working. There was no connectivity.

[00:12:23] It's one of these really difficult things to find out, what went wrong. They're trying to fuel the car, then everything stops working because there's no internet connection, but they're not aware of the fact that they have no connection; it doesn't look like they don't have one. So it's working with the customer care team at ExxonMobil and our own customer support team in Fiserv that we get into the detail of these kinds of issues. That's one example.

[00:12:53] There are more examples. When somebody fuels the car, the payment can fail in very unusual circumstances. Then you may have issues where somebody might drive off without actually paying, or thinking they paid. Detecting those kinds of scenarios is very important, because it is a digital experience now and there's no actual interaction with the staff at the site. There are lots of different things that can happen in the physical, real-time fulfillment.

[00:13:33] Fiserv has lots of different customers around the world, and we do a lot of order ahead with QSR or casual dining, such as Burger King, Dunkin' Donuts, Chick-fil-A, all those big brands. We do order-ahead solutions with them, but it's the same type of situation. There's food that has to be prepared within a few minutes of the person arriving. Everything has to happen in real time without a glitch. Hopefully that sets the scene for the kinds of challenges that we faced. You can imagine, when you scale out something across multiple markets, there can be a number of very nuanced issues that come back through customer care and through our reporting systems.

Field testing

[00:14:28] One of the key aspects of how we solved for this was through field testing. We have a quality cycle that you'd probably be familiar with if you're a tech company doing QA. We have UAT we do internally, then we have business UAT with the customer, then we go to production and we do field testing. Over the last 12 months we've really developed quite a sophisticated field testing capability across multiple markets in Europe now, and a structure around that, and lots of processes and methodologies.

[00:15:07] What the field testing does is it means we go out with our new app or new features or new release, and we test that for real with real people's accounts, whether it's Apple Pay or a bank or credit card, debit cards, PayPal, the multiple payment methods they can use, with their own loyalty account, etc. They use their car, they go to different stations. It's probably something you're familiar with, and it's becoming well documented now online; I see lots of articles coming up about this.

[00:15:46] We do extensive field testing to ensure everything is good, and regression test all the features to make sure that when we do release, the quality is really good for the customer and we don't introduce any issues. Because, as I said before, when you do introduce an issue in a real-time situation, it's a much bigger problem than it would be in traditional digital ecommerce. Then we have a product certification step before we go live, where we recap all the testing and all the quality checks we've done, and we have a decision to launch.

[00:16:29] Without getting into too much detail around the field testing, that's a high-level overview of our process. I have some photos to bring it to life, with one of the field testers we have in Germany, so you can see going to the car and fueling, et cetera. You can imagine it's quite an interesting job. What we've decided to do now is we've appointed a full-time manager to run the field testing function in our organization in Europe. So we've formalized everything. It's a new function; it was a new concept to all of us in product and QA and other departments.

[00:17:10] We've professionalized our field testers across Europe and trained them, and we have a specific approach to wrapping them up with each new release, telling them how the features work, testing different scenarios, and looking for issues and things that might go wrong. It's something I thought might be of interest to people in the UXDX community.

Data, analytics and privacy

[00:17:40] That's a high level. Some of the data analysis tools we have would be things like Firebase. We have our own reporting system where we create dashboards; these are mocked figures on the right, but we do track them weekly. We have a lot of alerts set up, of course, to track transaction levels, etc., trying to proactively find where there might be issues. We have funnels set up in Firebase to see if there's any drop-off in different customer journeys. There could be five or six core journeys in the app, depending on whether you're looking for a petrol station, which is a site finder feature, or if you're actually fueling or paying or registering an account. Different journeys and different funnels applied.

[00:18:28] Nowadays, as you're probably all aware, data privacy is a major issue. We have to be very much, especially with markets like Germany, ahead of the regulation and conscious of what data we capture, why we capture it and where it's kept. That's something to maybe reflect on as well: using data analysis in the right way, with anonymized data, adhering to GDPR and the different rulings that have happened in recent years. It's probably worth mentioning that.

Conclusions

[00:19:05] That's most of the points I wanted to land on today: to share our experience and our story. Then a couple of conclusions. Field testing is now core to how we deliver and manage this product. We set up a function around field testing and professionalized our field testers. And as you can imagine, executing a field testing program has its own challenges. Our new head of field testing is joining next week, so maybe in a few months' time she'll come back and give you a more detailed talk on those challenges around field testing.

[00:19:52] That's all I have for today, so hopefully that was useful, and I'm looking forward to speaking with some of you soon. Thank you.