Ipiranga Petróleo Creates Unparalleled Mobility and Convenience with HCL DX

Keeping Their Competitive Edge

Ipiranga Petróleo is a Brazilian fuel company, headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, and is a subsidiary of Ultra. It is the country’s second-largest fuel distribution company, and the largest in the private sector. 

The company has multiple businesses in the oil and gas sector, with approximately 7000 gas stations, 2,000 convenience stores and 1,500 oil change/automotive services units.

Jorge Martins, Strategic Project Manager, was interviewed and provided content for this story. He explains that the company is known for combining mobility, functionality and convenience to their over 30 million customers and is recognized as a pioneer in their customer loyalty and payment programs. 

Their loyalty program is the largest in the country. When a customer fills up at their gas station or consumes products or services from the Ipiranga network, they earn points that can be exchanged for perks or discounts on future purchases.
 
The oil and gas industry requires a process of continuous evolution and daily innovation to stay ahead of competitors who quickly deliver similar solutions. Ipiranga’s challenge is to provide excellent service quickly and cost-effectively. 

Customers have come to expect this continuous innovation and excellence from them, in both the B2B or B2C segments, and their customers always expect to be surprised with new deliveries of value. Sometimes those “surprises” can simply be small adjustments and improvements to existing processes.

How do they stay on top and keep their edge over the competition for the long term?

New Ideas Bring Positive Results

It is Ipiranga’s practice to constantly listen to incoming ideas for process improvements from their employees and customers. In addition, they routinely self-examine their operations in search of improvements that will lead to better business results.

In particular, they look for improvements that will differentiate them from their competition, this includes pricing, terms and conditions, delivery of products and services, plus a broad range of support capabilities to increase customer satisfaction and to help the business run smoothly. This generates a healthy flow of customers attracted to the brand.

For this continuous improvement mission, they rely on strong partners who are experts in their industry segments who bring their expertise and “muscle” to build valuable offerings.

That's why they chose to partner with HCL and its Digital Experience (DX) solution which has extended and improved their ability to connect with their customers. 
 
The DX platform offers robust and unique solution-building capabilities that align with new technologies and DX solutions are easy to deploy, support and maintain.

Agile deployment allows for early feedback

Ipiranga recently started a major project to migrate their platforms and, due to the size and complexity of the project, they needed to divide it into phases. With this approach they could stay focused on manageable-sized project components and minimize impact on employees and customers and not disrupt “business-as-usual" operations.

They began this project using a previous solution (before DX) and almost immediately ran into performance problems that prevented them from advancing the project at the speed they needed.

They switched the platform to HCL DX and were able to hit the ground running, and with each of the completed phases along the way they were able to get feedback and make improvements in performance, reduce development time, and accelerate deliverables to their customers.
 
They also believe that the better the platform is in delivering information, functionality and automation, the fewer customer support calls they receive. This has meant reduced operating costs and increased customer satisfaction. What they like to call, “a perfect marriage”!
 
With the HCL DX team, Ipiranga experienced close teamwork, quick responses, and the full support necessary for the team to learn, evolve and discover new ways to innovate. 

They are excited about what is next: adding qualitative analytics to their customer’s journey. With this added capability they will be able to better understand the customer’s experience on the site so they can take proactive steps to improve it.
  
Ipiranga believes their role as a business is to be sensitive to ever-changing needs of the market and exercise their creativity to continue this process of transformation through innovative solutions that can solve traditional problems in a practical way, that always brings a positive impact and makes a difference in people's lives. HCL DX aligns with and supports this belief.