Better Experience #9: A Faster Way to Refuel Your Gas ⛽️🚗
An ironically more environment-friendly gas station.
Better Experience Design is a collection of arbitrary encounters with everyday things that have given us either delightful or stressful experience.
Have you ever been in a hurry on your way to one point to another but ran out of gas because you’re too lazy to refill the gasoline the day before? And in your limited time, you stopped by a gas station and had to wait in a long queue line?
Those experiences might have given us mixed feelings about our poor life choices. But what if it’s actually not our fault? What if, it’s actually the refueling process that needs to be improved?
In this article, I’m going to throw some ideas about how to speed up the process of gas refueling, and let’s discuss!
1. What is it and what is the purpose?
For those of you who commute using your own vehicle — of course, you can’t avoid refilling the tank with gas to power your lovely vehicle (unless you are using an electric car, but still, you need to recharge them).
In Indonesia, provider for gasoline is mostly controlled by Pertamina, a national company who owns and rule the oil and gas. It’s common to see someone who will assist you in the station — I love to call them the “Gas Helpers”.
2. Why/When did I use it?
Gas Helpers have really helped when I needed to refill my gas tank. We can just tell them how much gasoline we need, give them the money, and they will help us to put in the nozzle and pour the gasoline in. Once it’s all filled, they closed off the gas cap, and off we go. Feels like a king.
And I think they are happy for helping us too.
3. Was it a delightful or stressful experience? Why?
1. The Time Problem
I found that the existence of the Gas Helpers is not a win-win solution. It’s a bit of an old-school service. (With all due respect, I’m really happy that they can help us to refuel our vehicle even without stepping out the car.)
However, I noticed that sometimes Gas Helpers are the main contributors of the long queue in a gas station. Mainly because they spent so much time to do their tasks while we’re waiting for our turn.
Start from asking how much you want to buy, receive your money, give you the change, input the gas amount, open up the cap, fill the tank, close the cap, and done.
To serve us, they need almost 60 seconds excluding the time we need to fill in our gas tanks. And they do that all day long.
But I found hope while I was refilling my motorcycle in a station near my house. A self-service station!
It’s quite rare to have a self-service station in Jakarta, so I am confident enough to say that this is a great improvement for this city.
Just like any service, we can still find some problem in the gas station. The queue line. The self-service station actually is not-so-self-service. They still need a Gas Helper, but they don’t stay in every pump, just one person for 8 pumps.
The difference is you need to pour the gasoline by yourself. But, the helper will still assist you to input the amount of gas and give you a receipt which has a barcode that you need to scan in order to fill your gas.
In this type of service, the helper can spend around 5–10 seconds to serve one customer, so we need to wait a minute if we are waiting on the 6th place.
2. The Aftermath
The receipt that we used to scan the barcode lasted only for 2 seconds. After that, most customers just throw it into a trash bin, and it’s definitely not environment-friendly.
Some receipts just flew around and cluttered the station because the wind blew them away.
4. Can it be better?
Definitely. Here’s how we think we can make the service better:
Substitute with auto-machine
The auto-machine has already been used in self-service gas stations in many countries. It can automate the transaction, just set the amount of gas and pay with your card. It’s still in the same flow as semi-self service, just without the helper. And you don’t need to take your change.
It may be easier to add payment method with E-money cards, since in Indonesia the usage of credit card is relatively low, and E-money card is being used widely for everyday use. So the customer can organize their expense for daily transport in one card for any type of transportation.
E-wallet Partnership
It can be an opportunity for gas-stations to improve their services since the usage of electronic wallets is growing in Indonesia.
The opportunity lies on some task that customer could do before they even arrive in the station, they just need to do it in a mobile app beforehand.
The benefits of this method are:
- The customer can select the amount of gas long before they arrive in the station, or while they are waiting in line (if any). It can cut off the time spent in the pump.
- They just need to go to any pump, and scan the code and pour in the gas!
- It cashless and paperless.
5. What do you think?
That might be some ideas that I think it can help the gas station to improve the service so it won’t take a long time in the station and we can save more time in our daily life.
However, there is also the danger of using your phone in a gas station!
There will always be more ideas to come up to make this better and better again, and of course, we’d love to discuss more. Let us know in the comment below if you have any! 😆
Thanks for reading! If you have any idea about what we should cover next, you can comment below / send us an email: hello@betterexperience.design !
