Changing Habits: Steering Behavioral Change Towards Optimal Fueling Buying
As a fleet manager, one of your primary goals is to optimize your operations, ensuring that every wheel-turn and pit-stop contributes to the overall performance of your business. One essential area, and one that we at Pump Price really pay close attention to, is optimizing the purchase of diesel fuel. You can understand the critical role that fuel plays in your business and the substantial savings that optimal fueling can bring, but what is very likely getting in the way of your goals are the fuel-buying habits of your drivers.
You and your fleet, contractors and drivers alike, are all on the same team, though not everyone on the team behaves that way. Drivers are hardy people, but they are not entirely immune from placing their own convenience at a higher priority to company profitability. Its a tricky balance, too, since fleets want to keep their drivers happy and they don't want to upset the apple-cart, as it were. So, how can we adjust individual behaviors that steer them away from personal comfort and toward shared responsibility of making the team a success? We'll get to that.
First, what are the existing habits that drivers have that may be impacting fuel decisions? Well, they're very all over the place, and very subtle. Some examples: a driver may like the sandwiches or the coffee better at one location or another, or they may like the bathrooms, showers, or facilities at one station vs another. And lets not forget, a really cute cachier can throw all the best laid plans and notions out the window. The point is drivers, like the rest of us, are influenced by preferences about the places they stop, instead of stopping at places that give the best deals. Generally, this is okay, and they should get a say in their daily routines, but they should also be made aware about how their choices are impacting the business.
Increase Awareness for Better Decision-Making
So, there are these existing habits that are adjacent to fuel-buying decisions, so how do do we alter them over time so we're buying fuel effectively? Well, you can't make a choice and about breaking a habit if you aren't aware there is a better choice to make, so we need to raise awareness of the right fueling choices, that's where our app comes in.
With a little wave of a magic wand, and some paperwork, our app will come pre-loaded with your own existing fuel deals and pricing through your EFS or COMDATA account. Your drivers can then see the fuel options that are discounted, and how they compare with other fuel options. We provide further guidance with our red-green indicators, providing an at-a-glance view of where the best prices are going to be.
An app for fuel-discovery is the first step in transforming your team. And sure, you can get along with a pricing spreadsheet, but as you'll see later, you'd be leaving a lot on the table. A holistic approach to transformation begins with fuel discovery, and we shouldn't skip it.
Show the Data
Transactional data is one of those unique things that can actually be analyzed after-the-fact to know whether good choices are being made. That's how credit-card companies, budgeting apps, or your bank are able to tell you when you're spending too much eating out! Many people, when confronted with the jarring reality of this data, will have a change of mind about how they are spending resources.
Pump Price does that. We look at a driver's Transactional data from fuel purchases and tell them how they're doing in making good decisions. We can tell them if they generally buy the more expensive fuel compared to their peers within the company, too. If they can see that, then they can begin to understand how their choices are affecting the company's bottom-line.
Social Proof and Competition
Once you can analyze transactional data and you can score it (assuming you can make 'scores' make sense across all situations) then you can gamify the process of buying fuel and setup leaderboards to show drivers how they are faring against other people in the fleet, or across broad samples of the industry. A common truism in business is that you get what you measure, or rather that your outcomes changed based on what you're paying attention to, and even moreso if everyone in the business is paying attention, and most impactful of all: if your metrics create a sense of competitiveness in your team.
"Influence", a book by famed author Robert Cialdini, suggests that we are more likely to do the things we observe others doing. The basic concept is the foundation of the idea of Social Proof. It turns out, according to Cialdini's research, that the effect is amplified when the social proof is coming from people who are more like us; ie. have the same profession, hobbies, and opinions. When we show drivers their behavioral scores relative to their peers, they will notice the differences and correct them. And given that there's always someone in a group who wants to be at the top of any leaderboard, the gravitational force of social proof will pull everyone up over time.
In order to sustain the improvement, however, it won't suffice to have a leaderboard and social proof. Everyone eventually gets tired of an unwinnable game, that is when certain driven individuals are dead-set at being at the top every time, the game gets tiresome. This is why you setup your system so that there are many ways to win. Pump Price's leaderboard system provides opportunities for each team member to have a shot at winning something such as:
- Best deal of the Day/Week/Month
- Best average price of the Month by Region
- Best average transaction score (proprietary score system)
Accelerate with Incentives
We've got a lot of opinions here, and in fact building a good incentive plan for your fleet is part of the consulting services we offer, but suffice it to say incentives are tricky to get right. If you always incentivize people, it might as well be part of their base pay, so you need to use incentives to drive adoption of a program, and occasionally reinforce its use. If you're interested in how to incentivize people to take the right behaviors, sign up for a demo today, and we'll discuss it together.
In summary, we can work together with you to:
- Create driver awareness of what the meaningful choices are.
- Employ data to give drivers feedback on how they're doing.
- Build social proof and gamify the process of buying fuel.
- Implement incentives to align drivers' actions with company goals.
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