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#LEAwards 2021 highlight: How Tania and a cat energised Petron

#LEAwards 2021 highlight: How Tania and a cat energised Petron

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In the highly competitive oil and energy sector, Petron Malaysia wanted to improve on its already tight performance metrics; boost its customer service; and create a new sales and marketing channel in the most trying of times.

To achieve this, Petron disrupted the category by being the first-ever petrol service station to launch a dual-language virtual assistant, proving that chatbot technology can be used a customer service, and loyalty marketing and sales tool, to deliver a more efficient and personalised experience for customers.

To help Petron achieve this, it approached leading Singapore chatbot company AiChat, and by combining their efforts, they won the silver award for Best Use of Technology at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s The Loyalty & Engagement Awards 2021

Challenge

With millions of fuel customers in Malaysia filling up at Petron service stations, there was just one problem it was constantly dealing with: to better manage and answer the influx of customer queries on its website and Facebook comments.

How could it ensure its promise of providing timely and adequate support to its loyal customers was met without overloading its customer team? It needed to understand its relationship with Petron – were they customers, non-customers and where were they in the stages of their membership?

On a very limited budget, there were several things it needed to do to improve its customer experience at scale, including providing customers with timely and accurate responses; driving card member sign-ups, engagements, and explain member benefits and rewards; identify and profile its customers and push out relevant promotions and offerings; and meet or exceed its customer satisfaction score target of 73%

Strategy

First, it needed to determine what Petron’s service advantage really meant for its fuel customers today, and the ideal online channel to establish a positive connection with its audience. With more than 560,000 followers on Facebook, this was an obvious space for it to put its marketing dollars behind to drive the communication efforts.

However, beyond posting regular promotions and service updates, how could it do more to profile its customers based on their membership status, and capture their preferences and drive personalised conversations?

Other conventional digital channels such as email and SMS were in place, however, Petron was looking to effectively reach out and engage the younger generation who are active on social media, and engaging them where they are spending their most time.

In tune with its culture to embrace service innovation and meet the growing customer expectations, it turned to AiChat for an AI-powered chatbot as a digital solution to enable a conversational experience, fully powered within the Facebook Messenger, and on the Petron Miles Malaysia website.

The adoption of a chatbot as a newly added digital channel was a clear choice for Petron. It would allow it not only to address the customer service situation, but also assist customers in online loyalty membership registration, recommend the nearest dealer for ordering of gas cylinders and recommend the right engine oil for their car, and more.

With the use of the chatbot, its customer profiling could become more granular, tracking their product interests, satisfaction ratings, card activation status, language preferences, etc.

These customer attributes data allows Petron to reach out to targeted audiences with personalised content and promotions via message broadcasts (and message journeys) and enabling it to run effective re-marketing campaigns in future via Facebook ads.

As Petron can now identify its warm and hot leads (or advocates), it allows it to create FB custom and lookalike audiences to target the specific segment groups. This will further optimise ad spend to get more relevant click throughs and conversions.

Execution

There are no happy coincidences, people initiate a chat for a very specific purpose. Our chatbot, with a lively personality, Tania, and her cat, Pat, was built to provide timely and accurate responses 24/7 and deflect the mundane and repetitive questions from the customer service team, allowing it to focus on other more critical and complex matters from customers.

Tania speaks in English and local Bahasa Malaysia and even Manglish (English with Malaysian slang), thereby improving operational efficiency and enhancing the online customer experience.

This is powered by AI chatbots that use natural language processing technology to understand the intent behind the question and solve the customer’s problem without any human assistance. The use of machine learning models significantly increases the functionality of the bot as it is able to identify hundreds of different questions written by a human.

Beyond customer service support, Petron developed a simple, yet clever data-centric approach to connect customers to its Petron Miles Card Loyalty programme. The chatbot solution not only provides a timely response for customer service assistance, it also educates customers on the Petron Miles card registration methods and helps with the membership registration process.

Not just that, it also exhibits rich product knowledge by serving up product information such as the benefits of Petron petrol, recommending the right engine oil for your car and locating the nearest station and dealer for you to purchase your Gasul cooking gas – all within a few chats.

To start, Tania, the virtual assistant asks a series of quick profiling questions to know the membership status of the user – non-members; members who were cardholders, but not registered; and registered card members.

Leveraging the automation of the chatbot, various message journeys (series of messages) were designed to nurture the customer for Petron Miles’ card activation (leads conversion) delivering a personalised experience for each of the segment group above.

By deeply knowing customers’ preferences and status, it has helped Petron to create a positive online customer experience and improve overall customer satisfaction.

Results

Tania was able to provide accurate and instant responses and notably, more than 91% of all the enquiries were handled independently of any human agents.

Despite the lockdown and period of distress felt by the general population in Malaysia, our customer satisfaction score reached the highest of all times, recording about 83% of all chatbot users with customer satisfaction of four and five-star ratings, well exceeding Petron’s target of 73%.

According to Petron and AiChat, Tania isn’t just a short-term campaign, but one that still continues – and one that has evolved towards the needs and conditions of Petron's customers in building an even richer online experience.

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