Z Energy
Helping Z Energy to Innovate their way to a World First.
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 Fastlane concept is one of 11 key concepts created as part of this programme.
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.
Fastlane emerged as one of the key concepts from the sprint and an idea the team wanted to take into prototyping and testing to understand how ‘desirable’ the Fastlane concept was in the eyes of Z customers. We also wanted to unearth any challenges and possible issues with the concept.
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
Fastlane in the Making.
Our solution
The Fastlane concept was created as part of a collaborative design thinking programme to create a vision of what loyalty might look like for a Z customer in the year 2020. D&Co designed a 6 week design thinking for innovation programme and worked with key members of the Z team to ideate, design, test and refine a series of new ideas for consideration.
Fastlane emerged as one of the key ideas the Z innovation team wanted to take into the ‘test and learn’ stage of our innovation process. We designed a Fastlane prototype and conducted in-field evaluative research to determine concept desirability.
The Fastlane concept gives Z customers a frictionless fuelling solution. Customers register their vehicle and add their credit card onto the new Z app. In doing so they activate Fastlane. The next time they visit a Z to refuel they drive in, fuel up and drive off - no on-site payment required.
The concept had overwhelmingly positive feedback from customers with 62.5% saying they felt very positively about the idea and the other 37.5% saying they felt somewhat positive about the idea.
Since its MVP launch in Greenlane Fastlane has scaled across the Z network. Further innovations have been green-lit to exit the innovation pipeline such as Z’s Sharetank.
Deliverables:
Design sprint facilitation. Prototype design. Evaluative research. Research synthesis.
Related Work
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Z Energy
Reimagining the Future of Loyalty
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Z Energy
Bringing the Future of Mobility to Life - Future Moves
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IAG - The Firemark Collective
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