Z Energy
Reimagining the Future of Loyalty.
Background
When Z Energy, one of New Zealand’s largest service stations, with over 150 sites across the country, wanted to explore what the future of loyalty might look like they approached D&Co to create their first innovation design sprint.
The challenge
Z’s new Chief Innovation Officer, Scott Bishop, wanted to demonstrate how design thinking could accelerate innovation at Z and in doing so sought D&Co’s expertise in facilitating design thinking for innovation.
“As part of introducing the new Innovation Refinery at Z, Russ and the team at D&Co designed and facilitated the first design sprint. This included an introduction to primary design thinking methods as we co-created a vision for the Future of Loyalty.
We then partnered with D&Co to go out into the field with customers to validate the desirability of key concepts where they shared evaluative research methods resulting in concepts being green lit to exit the innovation process into commercialisation.
D&Co’s fresh thinking, collaborative and flexible nature combined with their creativity and storytelling has resulted in them being engaged across multiple areas of the business.”
— Scott Bishop, Chief Innovation Officer at Z Energy
Re-imagining the Future of Loyalty and in the process giving light to two world firsts.
Our solution
D&Co was charged with designing and facilitating a design sprint to explore the Future of Loyalty and in doing so surfaced a number of highly innovative concepts including world first product concepts; Fastlane and Sharetank.
We designed a 6 week sprint to demonstrate accelerated thinking and to help coach Z’s internal team on the powerful combination of design thinking and human-centered design.
The sprint took insights to ideas, ideas to concepts and concepts to experiences. In typical D&Co style we ventured away from long form documentation in favour of a highly visual set of large format boards that clearly communicated a vision for the future of loyalty.
We laid out our objective, business hypothesis, loyalty levers and then travelled through a 6 months in the life of narrative for a future state customer. This took the form of storytelling and a series of key moments or concepts across the forecourt, in the convenience store and at home/work.
Driving Innovation and Loyalty
The Future of Loyalty boards took pride of place in Z’s Innovation Refinery and were used to onboard new members of the team and as a springboard for further prototyping and concept advancement which D&Co also led.
D&Co continue to work with Z and have worked across the business on a variety of exciting initiatives, from defining both the Z Energy and Caltex CX Strategy to bringing the Future of Mobility to life, and assisting in Z’s EX and CX capability build programme.
Deliverables:
Innovation design sprint design and facilitation. Desktop research. Prototype Development. Ethnographic research. Strategy.
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