Designing for Decisions: Sharetank
How we used behavioural design mechanics to shape our customer’s decision-making process
Imagine sitting in traffic on a Friday afternoon (for some of us still working from home, it really will have to be an exercise in imagination). As you eye the dashboard’s fuel gauge, you wonder if it’s worth making a stop at the petrol station. “How much driving am I doing this weekend? Can it wait?” You lead a busy life, and stopping to fill the car with petrol is never a welcome chore. And it’s one of the more expensive transactions you have, which brings unneeded anxiety as you try to recall this week’s fuel prices. This is a shared experience for many drivers, who find themselves triggered by price boards or empty tanks to make their fuel purchase decisions.
Based on these observations, my team and I at Z Energy wanted a way to offer more control over the purchase and management of fuel for drivers, their families, and employees. The result was Sharetank.
Launched last year, Sharetank allows our customers to digitally pre-buy fuel in bulk at the lowest price in their area, then share it with family or employees. Customers can now buy any amount of fuel when the price is right for them, helping to re-frame the decision making process around when and where to stop for petrol. We designed Sharetank to not only replace decisions that drivers were making previously, but to facilitate a new set of decisions that would give our customers more control and transparency to the fuel purchasing process.
“Should I just stop here for some petrol, or can it wait?”
Pulling into the petrol station and filling up is the quintessential reactive decision made as drivers pass Z while on the last quarter tank of fuel. Some even opt to drive several more kms to save money. The new, proactive decision we want to offer customers is: “I heard about this Sharetank thing from a friend—should I give it a go?” But let’s face it: changing a customer’s behaviour from habits ingrained in us for years—like how we fill up—is difficult (I wrote about just this when we launched Fastlane a few years ago). Expecting someone to download any new app is a barrier. To then suggest that they use the app as the new way to purchase fuel can be a full-on road block. Across our customer demographics, we knew that such a level of behaviour change would be a challenge to tackle.
Build confidence to get customers over the line
One of our solutions to manage this transition was to do a “try-before-you-buy” approach, offering free fuel so customers could try Sharetank out before committing to buy some litres themselves. Another approach was to do a robust onboarding experience, explaining everything to a new customer to build first-time user confidence.
Another strategy was to rely on a word-of-mouth network of happy customers. While we haven’t tested every approach yet, the word-of-mouth strategy actually has worked well to reach the growth we needed to learn. As one customer said: “A friend told me about Sharetank and showed me how to use it on the App. I did it there and then. Put $150 on Sharetank. I reckon I’ve now told about twelve of my friends.” Because people feel so compelled to try Sharetank at the recommendation (or sharing) of friends and family, we believe they’re able to work through the behaviour changes necessary to use it. Plus, now that we’ve designed the purchasing decision to be proactive, rather than reactive, we can creatively engage our customers in unique ways.
“Do I fill the tank, or just put in $50?”
Here’s another question we often ask while pulling up to the pump. The decision is usually reactive in the moment as well, unfortunately catching some off-guard because they haven’t budgeted for a large fuel purchase that week. The new decision we want to empower our customers with is, “How much fuel should I pre-buy, given the price and my budget?” We were particularly interested in how people would react to this new option to pre-buy, because one tank of fuel is already a large spend for many. Convincing a customer to spend $500, $1000, or $2000 at once is a challenging design problem, no matter how good the price per litre. Plus people’s idea of a “good” price is entirely based on their own perception, how aware they are of the price-boards, and whether they keep up with the overseas fuel market.
Redefine a customer’s price point
We had to keep this relativity of the fuel price in mind for the new decision process. Dan Ariely calls this phenomena arbitrary coherence in his book ‘Predictably Irrational’: “Although initial prices are ‘arbitrary,’ once those prices are established in our minds they will shape not only present prices but also future prices (this makes them ‘coherent’).” That initial price is then anchored in the customers minds — which is why they call that initial price the anchor price. This anchor price directly influences how people make purchasing decisions.
So with Sharetank, how we priced was crucial to the success of the product. Since customers are pre-buying, we are able to offer a unique proposition in the market: the lowest price within a given area. This pricing model gives confidence to our customers that they are getting the best deal around. In normal markets — or in falling markets like we are in now — this price is often below a customers’ anchor price, making them feel like it’s a good deal from the get go. Now, we are learning that once users have started using Sharetank, their relative price coherence “resets” to the price they bought their litres in bulk at — giving them a new sense of cognitive freedom. Plus, we can use that data point to help nudge them towards future purchases too.
Disproportionately reward high-value customers
We knew the relative “low price” alone wouldn’t be enough, though. So, we ran an experiment to see if a reward would entice customers, inline with one of Z’s loyalty principles: “Higher value customers should receive disproportionate reward value and be treated differently.” Half of our customers were rewarded with free litres when they bought more, and half weren’t rewarded at all. What we found is that customers who were offered bonus litres purchased nearly 50% more volume than the non-rewarded customers. We coupled these free rewards as a “surprise and delight” experience in the app as well by utilising haptics and sound, making it really feel like something special was unlocked. The sum of all of design decisions have created a positive business impact, even though we’re giving away free fuel. As Ariely stated in his book: “Nothing beats the emotional surge of free”.
Offer control with a new way to budget
Finally, users are able to share their virtual fuel tank with others, such as family or employees, allowing fuel budgeting to happen all in one place. Customers can control who has access to their fuel and see the activity in real-time, which for many are features that have only ever existed in business fuel cards. Many people asked if we would have launched earlier without the sharing feature, and we always responded the same: no. We believe it’s the blend of the proposition, reward, and sharing that gives people the control to make the most informed decision of how to manage their fuel spend in whole new ways with Sharetank.
“Should I use my Sharetank today or not?”
This will be a new question asked more and more as people turn to Sharetank as the way to purchase and redeem fuel. With competing discount programmes, and the price of fuel fluctuating all of the time, it’s fair to wonder if using your Sharetank balance will always be the best decision. The two ways that we are designing for this decision is to build transparency with our customers and create more value within the wider Sharetank ecosystem.
Utilising the feedback loop to build trust
Giving all of the information and data available to our customers would be overwhelming. Being transparent, for the sake of transparency, won’t actually build the trust that we need for continued use. Instead, we considered what data we could give to our customers to encourage them to return.
For Sharetank, this was savings against the normal pump price at redemption. In the Z App, we show customers their savings per redemption in the notification after filling up, plus total savings to date throughout the experience (like the monthly digest above). These features show that there are indeed significance cost savings with Sharetank, reinstating the ongoing use of Sharetank. Furthermore, if the price of fuel has gone down since you purchased on Z App, we advise our customers when they are filling up if the price at the pump is actually cheaper than their Sharetank litres, encouraging them to save those litres for another time when pump prices go higher. It may seem crazy to be so transparent, but it builds the level of trust we need for ongoing customer use.
Create more value within Z’s ecosystem
As mentioned previously, during the build process we had many choices to make of when we would launch Sharetank to the market. One of these decisions was to launch Sharetank as a standalone experience, which only worked with the payment terminal inside the store, or to launch integrated with all our systems. When we went out and asked our customers what they expected, we not only learned that they wanted it to work everywhere, but they actually preferred to redeem at the pump! We made the decision to add to the scope of our MVP and flesh out some of these features. It’s not just payment integration either. We decided to build Sharetank within Z App so we can offer other convenient features which integrate with Z’s ecosystem such as Carbon Count and Fastlane. Having everything in one place keeps the Z customer experience cohesive and engaging.
We believe it’s these types of design decisions that keep our customers using and trusting Sharetank for their fuel purchasing experience.
A New Perspective
Imagine again you’re on the way home from work on a Friday afternoon. Your fuel gauge is nearing the end of the tank, but you are not concerned. Whether you choose to fill up now or later, you have the confidence that wherever or whenever you choose, you can access the “virtual tank” of litres you’ve already purchased, in an informed way at the right price. It’s this feeling of confidence and control that helps customers feel like they’ve really hacked the system. And as a designer of this experience, I’m stoked to have facilitated that kind of freedom.
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