The reason why we did this is, we asked ourselves, what would happen if these small operations could combine their knowledge of their market, of their neighborhood, with the state-of-the-art technology? That’s how we came up with a consumer app called Earnify. It is kind of the Uber of loyalty programs. We did not name it BPme. We did not name it BP Rewards or ampm or Thorntons. We created one standardized loyalty program that would work in the entire country to get more loyal consumers and drive their frequency, and we’ve scaled it to about 8,000 stores in the last year, and the results are amazing. There are 68% more active, loyal consumers that are coming through Earnify nationally.Â
And the second piece, which is even more important is, which a lot of companies haven’t taken care of, is a simple to operate, cloud-based retail operating system, which is kind of the POS, point of sale, and the ecosystem of the products that they sell to customers and payment systems. We have applied AI to make a lot of tasks automated in this retail operating system.
What that has led to is 20% reduction in the operating costs for these mom-and-pop store operators. That 20% reduction in operating costs, goes directly to the bottom line of these stores. So now, the mom-and-pop store operators are going to be able to delight their guests, keeping their customers loyal. Number two, they’re able to spend less money on running their store operations. And number three, very, very, very important, they are able to spend more time serving the guests instead of running the store.
Megan: Yeah, absolutely. Really fantastic results that you’ve achieved there already. And you touched on a couple of the sort of technologies you’ve made use of there, but I wondered if you could share a bit more detail on what additional technologies, like cloud and AI, did you adopt and implement, and perhaps what were some of the barriers to adoption as well?
Tarang: Absolutely. I will first start with how did we enable these mom-and-pop store operators to delight their guests? The number one thing that we did was we first started with a basic points-based loyalty program where their guests earn points and value for both fueling at the fuel pump and buying convenience store items inside the store. And when they have enough points to redeem, they can redeem them either way. So they have value for going from the forecourt to the backcourt and backcourt to the forecourt. Number one thing, right? Then we leveraged data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to personalize the offer for customers.
If you’re on Earnify and I am in New York, and if I were a bagel enthusiast, then it would send me offers of a bagel plus coffee. And say my wife likes to go to a convenience store to quickly pick up a salad and a diet soda. She would get offers for that, right? So personalization.Â
What we also applied is, now these mom-and-pop store operators, depending on the changing seasons or the changing landscape, could create their own offers and they could be instantly available to their customers. That’s how they are able to delight their guests. Number two is, these mom-and-pop store operators, their biggest problem with technology is that it goes down, and when it goes down, they lose sales. They are on calls, they become the IT support help desk, right? They’re trying to call five different numbers.
So we first provided a proactively monitored help desk. So when we leveraged AI technology to monitor what is working in their store, what is not working, and actually look at patterns to find out what may be going down, like a PIN pad. We would know hours before, looking at the patterns that the PIN pad may have issues. We proactively call the customer or the store to say, “Hey, you may have some problems with the PIN pad. You need to replace it, you need to restart it.”
What that does is, it takes away the six to eight hours of downtime and lost sales for these stores. That’s a proactively monitored solution. And also, if ever they have an issue, they need to call one number, and we take ownership of solving the problems of the store for them. Now, it’s almost like they have an outsourced help desk, which is leveraging AI technology to both proactively monitor, resolve, and also fix the issues faster because we now know that store X also had this issue and this is what it took to resolve, instead of constantly trying to resolve it and take hours.
The third thing that we’ve done is we have put in a cloud-based POS system so we can constantly monitor their POS. We’ve connected it to their back office pricing systems so they can change the prices of products faster, and [monitor] how they are performing. This actually helps the store to say, “Okay, what is working, what is not working? What do I need to change?” in almost near real-time, instead of waiting hours or days or weeks to react to the changing customer needs. And now they don’t need to make a decision. Do I have the capital to invest in this technology? The scale of bp allows them to get in, to leverage technology that is 20% cheaper and is working so much better for them.
Megan: Fantastic. Some really impactful examples of how you’ve used technology there. Thank you for that. And how has bp also been agile or quick to respond to the data it has received during this campaign?
