Circle K and Wawa focus on the specifics of convenience store CX
The quality of customer experience (CX) convenience stores offer couldn’t be clearer. It’s right there in the word “convenience”: customers should be able to come in and find what they want, when they want it, with as little effort or challenge as possible.
Both Circle K and Wawa are good examples of convenience store chains who have lived up to that definition, but neither of them are anywhere near done improving.
During the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) “Big Show” in New York last month, the convenience stores chains outlined recent strategies and technologies that they say are creating better outcomes for customers and employees alike.
For the past for years, for example, Circle K has been partnering with WorkJam to use its mobile applications to empower its frontline staff.
Rather than use paper or manual efforts to communicate shift schedules and tasks to be done, Circle K is now listing staff tasks on a daily basis in the app. Once they’ve completed a task, the app notifies district managers and other operations personnel. This has been helping to get stores ready on a daily basis, according to Circle K director of operations excellence Jennifer Karras.
“We went from a culture of no phones to using your phone,” she said.
To date, Circle K has more than 51,000 active users of its app across North America. The technology doesn’t just designate assignments but has become core to internal communications processes. Even the company’s CEO will post messages that frontline staff can read, Karras said. It’s also used to recognize employee anniversaries, birthdays and other milestones.
“It’s almost become a Facebook of Circle K,” she said. “You can like and respond to posts, and our executives can take selfies when they visit the stores.”
Beyond keeping everyone on the same page, Karras said Circle K is using the app to improve the customer-centric journey it provides. For example, alerting staff about out of stock items or a restroom that needs to be cleaned can make a big difference on Net Promoter Scores (NPS), she said. “We found our promoters visit our stores two times more than the detractors.”
At Wawa, fine-tuning CX is not just about enhancing everyday operations but creating a consistent customer and employee experience as the company grows. While it took some 60 years to reach 1,000 stores, for example, Wawa intends to nearly double that footprint by 2030. That means opening up 18 stores a year.
In an NRF session that was posted online, Wawa director of technical support Declan Forde said that level of expansion will require rethinking some existing processes. This includes requests for help from area managers that may be responsible for 10 to 15 stores.
“They have grown up trusting that they can pick up the phone and call somebody when something breaks at one of their stores,” said Forde, describing this as Wawa’s ‘phone a friend’ model. “That just doesn’t scale when you have 2,000 stores and the associated growth in the area manager population, Everybody can’t be picking up the phone to call their best friend to fix something. So we’ve got to put some automation, put some put a digital process in place to simplify that experience.”
Forde said Wawa is working with technology partners like Service Now and Kyndryl as part of that automation effort. At the same time, though, he said Wawa is very focused on preserving the human element wherever possible.
“They can order (a sandwich) through through a touch screen. But the person handing them the sandwich will say, ‘Don here’s your hoagie,’” he said. “When they go up to the register, the register associate will know who they are and engage in the conversation.”
Customers may be more appreciative of these CX efforts than convenience chains anticipate, Karras said.
“If a customer has a good experience, what we’re finding is that we’re getting much more recognition than we are dissatisfaction, which is an eye opener for us,” she said. “We thought we’d get more complaints, but customers are taking the time to talk about the good experience they had.”
