CCS launches it’s first Datadriven Product

CCS is the dominant provider of services related to corporate fleet management and fuel spendings management for companies of all sizes, ranging from small businesses to large enterprise but also government organisations. Key advantage is dense network of partnering gas stations, which virtually covers 100% of the market in Czech republic and major part of the Slovakian market as well. Historically, the fuel spending management program was core of the business model.

Technological progress, advances in the range of services associated with credit cards and especially rise of loyalty programs designed by dominant gas station chains caused significant changes in customer behaviour. Additional pressure on the market and increased price sensitivity were created by the economic trends of last decade. These circumstances led previous general manager Philip Staehelin to start considering new ways to create new differentiation points from its new competitors. CCS knew they have lots of interesting data to their disposal and wanted to create single touch point for their customers, where they could manage and optimise their fuel cost and ultimately save money.

Only six months after starting to work with Keboola, CCS received great recognition of their efforts by being listed in TOP 10 in annual internet awards in ‘Data Driven Project’ category alongside with some of the most ambitious central european start-ups, when comparing the resources invested in this project we consider this incredible success. However we know shiny awards don’t make for good ROI, so let’s get into it.

Current Challenge

“Our industry became extremely competitive in recent years. This has impact on both our existing and potential new customers, who are constantly being presented with very aggressive offers by our competitors. They are being lured by rather high discounts on per liter prices in exchange for loyalty pledge to limited network of given provider” says CFO Tomas Cervinka.

“We were deeply convinced that offers like these were to customers disadvantage not only for the discomfort of having to refill in limited network of gas stations but mainly because of much higher prices per unit than market average, where even with significant discount, customer doesn’t reach the expected savings.”

CCS knew we had data to prove this but it was particularly frustrating because their analytical team at that time was due to largely manual process only able to accommodate tiny part of the incoming requests by the sales teams and customers who in time started demanding more detailed cost benefit analysis of their services.

Keboola in the game

CCS was over a year considering establishing their own in-house BI team but lack of expertise and questions around right technology choices and long delivery times were slowing down the decision process and executive action. “We were worried the project will take over a year and will become cost prohibitive” says CFO Tomas Cervinka. “In the end, working with Keboola proved quite the opposite. Key reports were set up within two weeks and whole system was fully automated and tested in few short months.”

Tangible result of this exercise was to provide not selected few but every sales person and account manager with reports which interpret cost analysis of spendings for both existing prospective customer of CCS compared to their competitor. This becomes incredibly valuable asset proving the value added of their services.

Turning point — CCS enables clients through analytics

“Using Keboola and GoodData stack drastically changed our approach to customer retention and acquisition, which is of course the bottom line of our business.” says Cervinka and while previously our sales reps had to wait up to two weeks for their ad hoc requests, reality of today is that every single one of them has their data ready in easy to present reports near real time with zero manual work required.

The results were so surprising and the benefit so apparent that CCS decided to create its own data driven product. “With this system in place, we are able to predict the most cost effective gas stations on routes frequented by client’s employees and prepare for them list of individually recommended stations. The savings calculated by CCS Smart Tank app were up to 20 cents on dollar!”

The Results

In six months time, Keboola built for CCS custom Business Intelligence project to support its sales strategy execution. Thanks to exact, trustworthy data delivered same day is CCS sales team able to articulate benefits of services it provides. To us, the most rewarding element was freeing up smart internal CCS analyst team by processes automation and observing how this additional bandwidth allowed them to create their own data driven application Smart Tank which received recognition in the industry as an interesting innovation.