MOL Group

 
 

MOL Group puts innovation in the fast lane with Salesforce

Food. Fuel. Coffee. When you’re planning a road trip, there’s more to having a good journey than getting from A to B. With 1,900 service stations across nine Central Eastern European countries, oil and gas giant MOL Group also sells more than 50 million cups of coffee every year, making it the largest coffee retailer in the region.

Surprised? Don’t be. The Trailblazing company is transforming the customer experience as part of an initiative to grow its Consumer Services business to amount for 30% of total group EBITDA by 2030. And giving drivers what they want, when they want it is key.

“With Salesforce, we can connect and engage with drivers across multiple touchpoints all over Europe, helping them to fuel their car and buy refreshments on the road,” explained Istvan Mag, Head of Digital Factory at MOL Group.

MOL Group is an international oil and gas company, headquartered in Budapest. It has operations across more than 30 countries and employs 26,000 people. Its retail business serves 10 million customers and it processes more than a million transactions every day.

Not content with improving the customer experience for just B2C customers, MOL Group’s B2B division is also getting in on the innovation action, building stronger relationships with business partners, fleet owners, and transport companies to learn how to better meet their needs.

 

We chose Salesforce because it has a clear vision for success, and for us that means a long-term partnership and a platform.”

László Stekl, Head of Information Technology, Mol Group Digital Factory

Leading a B2C revolution with an exceptional driver experience

MOL Group’s Consumer Services division started by defining the ideal customer experience, and discovered what people wanted most of all was a personalised, convenient experience. For drivers, that means powerful mobile apps, personal discount vouchers, easy payment, and a loyalty scheme that rewards returning customers.

“We created personas to find out what customers want, then built a platform to enable us to give them that experience,” recalled Mag.

To accelerate innovation within the business, the IT team worked closely with other business teams to create a Digital Factory with shared KPIs. Using an agile approach, they deployed an integrated minimal viable product (MVP) built on Salesforce at speed. The MVP loyalty programme was launched in Croatia under the INA retail brand (INA Loyalty) in September 2020, and since then more than 250,000 customers have registered to it.

Achieving a 360° view of their customers with a central repository for data was the first ambition realised with the MVP, and with Salesforce CRM, the team broke down silos and simplified integration with other business-critical systems using MuleSoft. “We spent two years getting foundations in place so we could innovate at speed in 2020,” said Stekl. “We want to become a data-driven company to unlock more actionable insights.”

Rolling out digital functionalities to help customers self-serve

To meet customer expectations, the team built a native mobile app both for iOS and Android using the Salesforce mobile SDK and created its Loyalty website based on Salesforce Experience Cloud (previously called Community Cloud) to give customers a seamless, omnichannel experience whenever they log into their account. So far 70% of loyalty customers have downloaded the app.

Customers can now view information to help them plan routes, track loyalty points, and access personalised promotions based on the service stations they visit all from their mobile phone. “We wanted to make sure customers didn’t have to hunt for information. With the app they can access consistent account information in their local language,” explained Mag.

When a customer logs in on the website, they’re taken to a community built on Experience Cloud. “We’ve built a community on Experience Cloud that mirrors the app experience,” explained Mag. “In the future we’re going to add a news feed so they can easily keep up with what’s happening at MOL Group and integrate the solution with Service Cloud so customers can track tickets from a single log in.

Cutting average call resolution times in half

Currently, customers can access the support desk by phoning a dedicated service line, and rolling out this service to more digital channels is still in the pipeline. But Salesforce is already helping reps to deliver a better customer experience, with knowledge articles to help answer common queries faster, and better visibility of the customer.

“Our service console helps us track performance and route cases to the right person. We’ve cut average resolution times by 50% and we’re tracking SLAs in every service team,” added Mag. “We sit with the team to find out how we can optimise the platform to better support them, and based on their feedback will be rolling out greater automation to help reduce manual input.”

Although early in its Service Cloud implementation, customer satisfaction in Croatia is already up to 20 points higher than MOL Group’s competitors, and 80% of customers would recommend the loyalty programme to a friend. Based on this insight the team is creating a referral programme this year that is expected to drive significant growth.

“We’re also going to add a ‘Rate my experience’ function to the app to capture real insights on customer satisfaction rather than relying on mystery shoppers,” added Mag.

An integrated B2B customer experience

B2C customers aren’t the only people benefitting from MOL Group’s Salesforce transformation, the B2B team is on its own journey to become more customer-centric for fleet management companies, wholesalers, and businesses who consume petrochemicals.

“Our vision is to align our portfolio and services to create an integrated customer experience across all product lines and 12 territories,” said Zsolt Viczian, Head of Downstream IT for the B2B business. “This will help us get better visibility of customers to give them a more valuable and seamless experience. It’s also the first step of our long-term goal to get more predictive.”

The team designed a unified solution built on Sales Cloud and Service Cloud in 2019 and went live in March 2020. In the first year 700 users were onboarded from six internal business streams and nine product lines. Salesforce is integrated with the ERP to give pre-sales, sales, and post-sales reps complete visibility of the customer journey from lead to sale and beyond.

“We replaced spreadsheets with structured processes in Salesforce and greater automation, which helps us to better serve customers,” revealed Viktor Kusik, Group CRM Programme Owner. “Having a single source of the truth has helped eliminate duplication, which also gives customers a more satisfying experience – especially when they reach out to the customer service team.”

Taking a data-driven approach to marketing campaigns

To build stronger customer relationships, the company is creating more personalised campaigns using Marketing Cloud for both B2B and B2C customers.

On the B2B side, the team is using the solution to generate newsletters, boost loyalty, and take marketing campaigns in-house. “Our goal is to send the right content to the right people at the right time to educate our prospects and move them through the sales funnel,” said Viczian.

On the other hand, the consumer business is focused on scale and creating real-time customer journeys. “Communications are sent via email, SMS, and Viber using dynamic templates, and Marketing Cloud’s analytics function means we can drill down into AB testing results to find the most effective methods for connecting to customers,” explains Stekl.

Open rates can vary between 60% and 10%, so being able to look into why there’s a disparity and test different subject lines, headlines, or the tone of copy helps the marketing team to ensure communications are resonating with the audience. One change the company has made is to include more calls to action to prompt customers to engage more with communications.

“The next step is to deploy the Send Time Optimisation functionality of Marketing Cloud to send communications to customers at the right time. Additionally, leveraging the vast power of data in our Data Lake, we are building a Next Best Offer capability across various journeys such as retention to communicate the most relevant offers,” said Mag.

Empowering customers with more ways to pay

With personalisation well under the way, the next step is to make engaging with MOL Group even more convenient. “We want to enable customers to pay for services such as the car wash from their phone, or to be able to choose whether to pay at the pump or go into the shop,” explained Mag. “If they do want to shop, we want to turn that into an opportunity to give them a more relaxing and enjoyable experience rather than a rushed transaction.”

Enticing customers with a more rewarding experience will also open up more opportunities for the company to increase retail sales, eventually enabling retail and mobility from a single app.

“Salesforce has helped us tailor the customer experience to be more individual and valuable, but by becoming more data centric we’ve also got the metrics to prove it,” said Stekl. “That’s pretty impressive for an MVP, and we’re looking forward to finding out what else we can do as we continue to evolve the platform.”

Meanwhile, the B2B team have never seen such a high level of enthusiasm for a project as they have from the Salesforce rollout. “Salesforce has excited and empowered our users. They have a state-of-the-art solution to put customers at the heart of everything they do,” said Viczian. “When we’ve deployed the solution to all our regions we’ll start looking at more functionality like Einstein, Commerce Cloud, and a customer community. But one thing’s for sure, Salesforce is vital to achieve our ambition of becoming more customer-centric and helping us stand heads above our competitors.”

 

Keep exploring stories like this one.

Loading Loading...|Please wait...|Still loading, just a moment...|Less than one minute remaining...

Questions? We’ll put you on the right path.

Ask about Salesforce products, pricing, implementation, or anything else. Our highly trained reps are standing by, ready to help.