Paul Wallace – a Loyalty Leader delivering a digital first customer loyalty experience with elegant simplicity

For many years now, I’ve admired the innovation of the 7-Eleven digital experience - specifically the utility and simplicity of the My 7-Eleven fuel lock proposition as well as the simplicity of the My 7-Eleven rewards offering.

So, when I finally had the opportunity to meet and have a Loyalty Leader (#38) one-one interview with Paul Wallace - Digital Area Lead @ 7-Eleven Australia about their digital first customer loyalty experience, I was a ‘little’ excited (understatement)!

Paul has an innovation mindset based on ‘let’s break this to make this better’ and continues to lead the wider 7-Eleven digital team on a mission of digital first customer loyalty to ensure the in-store experience, as he says, is “simple and speedy” (I love that).

This Loyalty Leader interview rocks!

I hope you enjoy it (as much as I did).

1. So, who is Paul? (outside of work) + a little on your work biography

I'm a country kid and grew up on a beef cattle farm in northeast Victoria near a little town called Greta - there's nothing there apart from a football oval! (It’s closest to Wangaratta and Glenrowan (famous for hosting the final siege and capture of the Kelly Gang in 1880)).

It was my grandparents farm on my dad's side and although it had been in my family, I always knew I was never going to be a farmer. It wasn't my thing. So, when I had the opportunity to go to Uni, I went to La Trobe Uni in Melbourne.

Funny thing is, now I love going home and helping dad on the farm feeding the cows and the different type of work that farming offers, using your hands versus your head.

Reflecting on it, I feel growing up in the country and in a farming community instilled my work values around authenticity, relationships, community where everyone helps each other and thinking differently. Because you know, no matter what, on a farm, you've always you've got to get stuff done and you've got to be a little bit creative to get it done.

I completed a Bachelor of Business in marketing, and I just loved business. When applying for graduate roles, I had this experience with two interviews on one day.

One was with a superannuation company and the other was with 7-Eleven. I studied my heart out for the superannuation role, it was a marketing coordinator role. The 7-Eleven role was a bit different. It was around store layouts and store merchandising.

I absolutely bombed in the interview for the superannuation role, it was so formal, a panel of three people and I was so nervous.

For the 7- Eleven role, it was more of a conversation, and I guess I nailed it because I got a call immediately after and I was in. Sliding door moment for sure!

I loved the role and the retail environment, working on store point of sale and then into a brand role working on Slurpee where we introduced the ‘Bring your own cup day’ that was a phenomenal success world-wide. We used as many digital channels as available to drive actual in-store impact.

I left 7-Eleven for some international travel (as Australians tend to do) with time in the UK working for LG Electronics and then in an agency across many clients

But my love for retail marketing sent me back to Australia in 2014 and luckily for me 7-Eleven were going deeper into the customer loyalty experience with a digital focus and I was taken back into the team.

We launched the first iteration of the fuel lock digital product and over the years we have iterated and improved the overall digital app utility and experience including the rewards offering.

I moved into leading the customer digital transformation program, where we were not just thinking about loyalty, but setting up the capability that's going to help drive customer outcomes and growth for the business, be it loyalty or e-commerce or payments.

Outside of work, I love running, having completed about 15 marathons so far! (Wow!)

2.Tell us about My 7-Eleven. Any stats you can share?

So, when we started thinking about loyalty, as a business, we felt it was important to communicate digital customer experiences that were helping our stores drive incremental outcomes.

Digital experience is one of our five growth pillars at 7-Eleven and loyalty sits as a strategic initiative underneath that digital pillar.

My 7-Eleven is our loyalty program for 7-Eleven customers and the largest component of that.

It’s focused on how we make the 7-Eleven experience simple and speedy to ensure customers get more value every time they shop with us.

We’ve got rewards and offers, which is our reward on seventh visit. And then we layer personalization or other offers within that. Members can also link a Velocity membership earning Velocity points on fuel and merchandise (product) as well.

Our marquee proposition is the fuel price lock, allowing customers to lock in their best local fuel price for seven days.

The last feature that we've got in there is pay and go, allowing customers to link their preferred payment cards to check themselves out whether it's in store or at the pump.

We have a total of 3.5 million registered members. Active users who have scanned in the last 90 days sits at 1.3 million. They haven't just opened the app or looked at an offer rather they've come into store, they've scanned and, transacted with us.

3. What is the most unique element of the program?

By locking your price, you know you're guaranteed that price and you can redeem it any 7-Eleven in Australia. You no longer need to drive around and make sure that you're going to a certain store. You just know, “if I go to 7-Eleven, that is my price”.

Along with convenience it gives us the ability to communicate Mobil quality fuels.

However, part of our strategy is not to be a just a fuel destination. We want to offer food and merchandise.

The fuel lock utility gives us the leverage to grow that brand awareness, real world word of mouth and 7- Eleven as a destination.

With that unique offering, we are now adding more value through My 7-Eleven Rewards and personalised offers and promotions.

4. Why do 7-Eleven invest in My 7-Eleven

We've always been customer led, and convenience is more than the product you sell.

The value that we offer is the product, the price point and the ease of the experience.

Certainly my 7-Eleven isn't just seen as a loyalty promotional program. It's how does it make the 7-Eleven experience simple and speedy, so customers will come to us over our competitors.

And then it's revenue and driving incremental spend.

But come back to the why, and those outcomes are because of being customer led.

5. If you had to choose the most important measures of success for your program, what would they be?

The one we really talk to internally is scan rate.

The simplicity of this is that everyone understands it, and everyone can rally around it, whether that's in-store or the loyalty team, if that scan rate is increasing, you are driving active users.

There's always a question of are we just discounting, so I'd equally put in there measuring our customer lifetime value, which for us is annual customer value.

As it grows, you've got to be able to demonstrate that it's incremental.

6. What are some of the challenges you face on an ongoing basis to keep the program relevant/fresh/thriving (internally and externally) and how do you overcome these?

Our focus is on how to keep promotional offers fresh and customer focused aligning internally across multiple teams on the framework to drive relevant customer missions so we can keep consistently increasing the store traffic.

A good example is we have a destination offer such as coffee to drive habitual visits versus a hero like a $2 sausage roll which is time limited to drive new missions. The framework allows the business to align and the teams can activate..

And then the other one is the in-store engagement.

You can have the best loyalty program with the best promotional program behind it but if it doesn't execute in-store, its simply going to fail.

We've done a lot of work to ensure there are cues within the store, whether that's at the point of sale, promotional space within the footprint of the store as well to highlight the app as the channel to engage with.

The team member engagement at the store level is vital.

We have a Digital Disruptors award where each quarter within each of our states, we award these to two stores who are driving the highest scan rates. And you can see in those stores the scan rate doubles. Seeing their name up there and the competitive element, really helps drive the execution and results.

7. If you could start again with a blank strategy canvas, what would you do differently?

Considering what we know now, I would say at the beginning we did not consider the importance of making the marketing team member experience easy to execute loyalty campaigns at scale. \.

Finding people with experience is hard so making sure your martech is easy to use so you can? upskill existing team members quickly and drive a test and learn culture is really important.

The second one is our internal metrics and reporting. The business now understands the growth opportunity of loyalty. And it's not seen as a discounting channel.

We got there eventually, but it was a little bit slow off the mark where people were questioning if sustainable growth for the business was being achieved.

So, if I had a blank canvas I would make sure what we measure from the start is aligned across the organisation and proves the performance of the program.

8. What advice would you give to brands thinking about a loyalty program?

Number one is it's got to have utility.

You need to solve a customer problem or pain point because that's where the true value and stickiness is going to be.

And then you can layer your loyalty promotional mechanics that drive behaviour change. But if promotions are your anchor, you're going to be in trouble retaining customers in the long term and also the sustainability of your program.

Start with your customer insight and evolve it as you learn from the real time loyalty data, because you never stop evolving. So, while fuel price lock has been around for ten years, it's gone through multiple iterations to where it is today.

In summary make sure that it's easy for customers, but it's sustainable for the business as well and never stop evolving.

9. What’s the biggest frustration you have with loyalty programs?

They don't solve for friction. They create it.

I feel sometimes with loyalty programs there's friction to engage with them because they want too much from you.

You know, they want all this data up front versus understanding that it's the data over time that is most important.

And then there's too much friction to redeem. So, you've been earning loyalty points or whatever for so long but to try and redeem them is a really hard process when it should just magically happen.

Why should I as a customer have to boost things? If I'm buying and in a loyalty program, shouldn't I just get the boost on my points automatically without taking an action.

That’s something we decided from the start we shouldn't do. We shouldn't put a step of friction there.

I do understand that loyalty programs do this to create intention and active engagement by members to see the value. I just think that's the easy way out. It’s all about the internal need, not about the customer need.

There's a tension there, I get it, but I think the tension should be how do you remove friction but still create that engagement.

10. What do you think is creeping up on programs that could disrupt them for better or worse?

There will continue to be discussions around automation on the marketing side.

But I also think about the customer uptake of AI agents and digital payments. Customers are going to look at how they use this technology to remove friction out of experiences.

And I think that's going to disrupt how brands can communicate with customers directly.

11. What’s the most underestimated force behind a program’s performance?

This one's easy.

It's the team.

We regularly say it takes a village to execute a loyalty program.

We all believe and buy-in to the programs including the support office at 7-Eleven, around 500 - 600 people and across our stores and we've got around about 8000 team members.

We have a loyalty squad that live and breathe it every day. And we've also got a my 7-Eleven app squad.

I think right through to our product tribe that look after our categories and sales, they're helping drive the promotional offers, our communications teams around the in-store execution and right through to those store team members.

You've got to be able to have consistent execution and focus to really drive improvements.

A good example now is the teams have really focused in on our seventh visit reward mechanic and how we drive improvements there.

That's been everything from what are the products and offers that are within that through to the communications, how we're simplifying the app experience.

So previously we thought it would be great if customers got to choose the product they wanted in the app but what we found was customers were then going into a store to redeem it, and maybe it was out of stock in that one store. That created a bad experience.

So now we allow them to choose when they get in the store and it’s these little improvements right across the business that for the first time in the program, reward on 7th visit scans have overtaken our fuel price lock engagement.

This shows that if you have that team focus right across the enterprise, you can start to really, shift and see the growth.

12. What are three important skills a loyalty program marketer needs?

1. Customer first thinking. Being able to anchor their thought process with the customer.
2. Be insight led. Being able to make sure they're using data to inform their thinking.
3. Curiosity. The willingness to do things differently. I don't know whether that's because I've come from a physical retailer where whatever we do, we actually have to break and reset processes internally because the store is the heartbeat of the business and we normally disrupt that. So, curiosity to do things differently and think outside the box.

13. If we are chatting again in (say) 2 years’ time, what do you predict would be the hot topic related to loyalty programs?

While loyalty programs are already proving to be a value creator, in the future I see this extending to playing a role in improving productivity of team members.

Therefore, while presently it is about driving a better customer experience, a loyalty program should also drive an easier team member experience to make them more productive in store.

A simple example in another category is how hotels created the ‘fast checkout’ with drop your keycard in the box when you leave, reducing impact on the team.

That's a good customer experience and I am sure it helps them manage their team productivity.

Certainly, within convenience stores we need to reduce complexity, and I think there’s a role where loyalty helps team members engage differently with our customers in a way that adds value to the customer but also makes their job easier.

For us, the Pay & Go utility in the My 7-Eleven App makes life easier for both the customer and the team member and while it might take the customer away from the occasional fuel co-buy, the experience increases overall frequency and annual customer value.

14. Leave us with a lasting loyalty thought

Summary

This Loyalty Leader interview with Paul is more than gold (superlatives aside)!

The wisdom Paul shared highlighted how the relentless focus on customer experience leads to a vibrant and valuable asset for the business and dare I say it, ‘asset’ for the customer through the price-lock proposition, rewards program, in-store experience and value offerings.

My three highlights (difficult to choose)”

1. ‘Simple and Speedy’. The clarity of their internal mantra to make the 7-Eleven experience valuable every time customers shop, is refreshing and compelling.
2. The team. Their team member engagement across the business is a critical enabler and for the store team this is enhanced by their Digital Disruptors Awards which adds to a competitive element and helps drive the execution and results.
3. Paul’s crystal ball quote (the future of loyalty of programs) – “While loyalty programs are already proving to be a value creator, in the future I see this extending to playing a role in improving productivity of team members.”

And I love (well not really) his frustration with loyalty programs….

“They don't solve for friction. They create it.”

Let’s do better loyalty programs!

Thank you Paul!

The Point of Loyalty specialises in customer loyalty and Joyalty* program strategy, design and deployment, advising brands on how to achieve long-term loyalty from 'The triple bottom-line of loyalty program success?'.

1. Business: Profitable and sustainable for your business

2. Customers: Meaningful and desirable for your customers

3. Team: With belief and buy-in from your team

Enabled by fit-for-purpose technology + data analysis and insights for action + dynamic personalised member dialogue.

Founder of The Point of Loyalty,?Adam Posner is a customer loyalty specialist and is author of the annual benchmark customer loyalty and loyalty program research study - For Love or Money? now in its 17th edition.

He has developed the Loyalty Program Experience Index SPVx, a rating of a loyalty program by its members based on their experience with the program weighted against three key variables of how Simple (S), Personal (P) and Valuable (V) the program is to them.

Adam also created the 'Six Currencies of Collection Loyalty Program members care about' now available as a SPECIAL EDITION of For Love or Money? and the?'Four Factor Quality Program Proposition' framework?to increase member activity.

Adam has been involved in the design and deployment of loyalty and rewards programs and loyalty research across industries including entertainment, education, pharmacy, hotels, trade and various retail sectors.

The contents of this article are the opinion of the author. No responsibility for loss occasioned by any person acting or refraining from the action as a result of the material in this article can be accepted by the author.