Smoother journeys and better services with the ABC-mobile application

In brief

Customer

SOK

Challenge ABC identified a need for its own mobile application that would cater more extensively to the needs of customers using cars.

Results More than half a million individual customers have installed ABC-mobile, which is available for Android and iOS phones.

Benefits The ABC-mobile application allows customers to take care of everything from charging or refueling their vehicle to washing it and ordering food from ABC Restaurants.

Together with S Group, Nitor designed and developed the ABC-mobile application, which allows customers to take care of everything from charging or refueling their vehicle to washing it and ordering food from ABC Restaurants. The service is constantly being developed to meet customers’ evolving needs.

The cooperation between Nitor and S Group started in 2017 when ABC identified the need for a mobile application aimed at drivers. S Group’s ABC chain of service stations serve as both resting places for travellers and service centres providing everyday services to local residents. The network of ABC stations, spanning from Mainland Finland to Åland, is the most extensive in the country.

More than half a million individual customers have installed ABC-mobile, which is available for Android and iOS phones. The app is constantly developed, and it serves as the digital interface to the ABC chain’s continuously improving services.

Photos: SOK and Lari Lappalainen

500k+

Users

33k

Take-away meals sold through ABC-mobile during the Covid-19 lockdown in spring 2020

1

ABC-mobile is the user interface to Finland’s largest fast charging network

The best experience is achieved by listening to the customer

Before having its own mobile application, the ABC chain had piloted mobile refueling as part of the S-mobiili app. Despite positive experiences, however, the number of people using the mobile refueling service did not grow at a sufficient pace. ABC identified a need for its own mobile application that would cater more extensively to the needs of customers using cars.

The successes and pain points that had emerged from the pilot were reviewed in user interviews conducted in the early stages of the project. Based on customer feedback and interviews, it was precisely the speed afforded by an own app and the possibility to pinpoint the user’s location at the ABC station they are at that would improve the customer experience. The app was developed with a strong focus on the smooth use of services.

ABC Charging makes EV charging effortless for everyone

Electric vehicle (EV) charging is S Group’s newest line of business. An operator such as S Group that has hotels, filling stations and grocery stores reaps huge benefits from a charging network. The charging network is currently expanding at speed, and it has taken only about a year to build a nationwide network of 1,000 charging points. Indeed, ABC Charging has grown into Finland’s largest fast charging network in just a year.

In service design, the goal was to make sure that it would be easy for new and occasional EV drivers to adopt and use the ABC Charging service. The work began by exploring existing implementations. ABC discovered that the user experience can be made much more convenient by incorporating processes from other services. For example, clarifying the signage and changing the numbering from cryptic charging device IDs to simple numbering used in refueling made the service easier to use.

Similarly to filling a car up with liquid fuels, electric cars are charged at a numbered charging point and the pricing is primarily based on the amount of energy charged.

The world’s fastest mobile refueling

The primary purpose of the ABC-mobile app, published in 2018, was to enable the world’s fastest mobile refueling. Based on customer feedback and interviews, the new ABC-mobile app had to provide solutions for locating the right station, finding a fuel pump and paying quickly.

The prototype was validated with both the staff and customers of ABC stations. Based on the findings, the design work was steered in a station-oriented direction: the app would primarily be used when arriving at the station. The issue of finding the right fuel pump was solved by creating a uniform appearance for the pumps in the application and the physical pumps at the station.

Before the app, the customer had to take their payment card and go to the pump to pay for their fuel. Now they can select the meter and pay from inside the car – convenient during the winter months! The refueling experience has been designed with a strong focus on the smooth use of the service. When the customer opens the app at the station, it will directly open the meter selection. Once the meter has been selected, the customer only needs to tap a button to pay for refueling to be able to start filling up their car. The app is constantly being developed further according to customer needs and feedback.

ABC Restaurants make everyday life easier in an agile way

ABC is one of Finland’s largest restaurant chains. While city dwellers use ABC stations as stopping points on their way to somewhere else, in smaller towns they are important clusters of restaurants and services.

When ABC piloted the food ordering service, the work began by creating a service concept based on customer wishes that would allow customers to order food in advance while on the road. The further development of the service was spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic, and thanks to its agile approach, S Group was able to add the take-away food ordering feature to the ABC-mobile app in record time.

"I'm proud of our team and the entire ABC chain for being able to transform the food ordering feature in ABC-mobile into a take-away model in less than a week. I remember being at my summer cabin heating the sauna on the Saturday before the Uusimaa Covid-19 lockdown would begin the following week. I was messaging with the chain director and the director of in-store operations about the possibility to accelerate the shift to the take-away model.

The work started immediately and we got the new model in six days! The following Friday, we had a radio advertising campaign running throughout the country in which we advertised the opportunity to order and pay for food in advance – and receive the order safely directly in the car. Parking spaces for picking up take-away orders were added to all ABC stations. We were able to sell 33,000 meals through ABC-mobile during the lockdown."

- Jussi Säilä, Chief Digital Officer, ABC chain

In addition to application development, the restaurant’s digital development project included the familiarisation of the staff with the new service and the construction of parking spaces for picking up orders at almost a hundred stations. Through ABC-mobile, customers can order and pay for their food in advance – and request it to be delivered directly to their car parked in a pick-up space. All ABC Restaurants’ menu items are available for mobile ordering, from à la carte dishes to pizzas and burgers.

The menu in the app is fully customisable and allows quick changes to be made – this is noteworthy in the case of a chain as large as ABC. Now the busiest travellers will no longer have to queue at the cash desk or wait for their food to be prepared.

When it comes to food orders, the role of the staff is significantly bigger compared to the other services in ABC-mobile. The advance ordering feature is primarily intended to make work easier and improve the employee experience. The development team tested the ordering process together with the restaurant staff. Now orders can be received at a more steady pace, which makes it easier to process them.

S Group and the ABC team’s ability to react to changes in an agile way is one of their key strengths. One example of this is the active dialogue with customers. In spring 2021, one of ABC’s customers shared on social media their wish to have the pizza delivered with an otherwise successful order pre-cut in the future. The ABC team thanked them for the suggestion and put the idea into practice in just a couple of days. Implementing even seemingly small changes in several dozen restaurants is challenging, but an agile organisation with a positive attitude towards change can succeed in it.

With ABC-mobile, customers can have their car washed without having to get out of it

The aim was to expand ABC-mobile with ABC Carwash services. The car wash service was also conceptualised together with the customers who use it.

The factors that significantly affect the user experience were identified through a customer survey. Washing a car differs from, for example, refueling in that customers tend to plan its timing more in advance. The application has a live feed that informs the customer real-time on the queue at the car wash. In addition, some customers were hoping for an opportunity to purchase a product that includes several washes, which would allow them to get a single wash at a lower price.

A monthly service was developed for frequent users, which recognises them automatically by the number plate of their car. If they wish, the customers can also choose that the door to the car wash facility is opened and the monthly wash initiated without separate confirmation in ABC-mobile. As a car wash takes more time than refueling, it was important to eliminate all elements that slow it down. This meant enabling payments directly in the app.

Modern technology choices enable quick adaptation to changing needs and user numbers

Most important for the ABC development team is a solution oriented approach. Instead of a single application, the team builds digital capabilities for ABC, preferably in a way that allows the entire S Group to benefit from this competence.

From the beginning, the solution architecture of the mobile app was implemented as a cloud-native serverless solution based on Amazon Web Services. In the early stages of the cooperation, all of this was something quite new to S Group, but they quickly realised the scalability and potential of the AWS cloud platform. The app itself was developed using React Native, which enabled a uniform implementation on Android and iOS platforms.

Payment features have played a key role in the application development. What makes the ABC-mobile app special is the amount of a one-time fuel sales purchase, which is in a completely different ballpark than in most apps. Compliance with the payment services directive PSD2 has added its own element to the development work and introduced bank specific differences to the implementation of mobile payments.

The directive aims to protect consumers against fraud and requires that banks must be able to request strong authentication for any payment transaction. The directive requires banks to carry out a risk assessment for every payment and, based on their analysis, decide whether or not strong authentication is required for the payment. This has made the user experience different for customers of different banks, and delivering an effortless user experience has been a delicate balancing act in the development work. The Bonus system, which is important for S group customers, also ties in with purchase process.

Identifying the user’s location is an integral part of the functionalities of the ABC-mobile app, which also makes it technically difficult to develop. Phones locate themselves using wi-fi networks, cell towers and GPS. When ABC-mobile was expanded to also cover electric charging, the typical location of charging points, i.e. parking halls, had to be taken into account in the development work.

The food ordering and electric charging features also required the possibility to send real-time status updates to provide the best possible user experience. The WebSocket implementation built for this purpose was also carried out as a serverless solution right from the start. At that time, the technology was still so new that it even prompted the people at AWS to ask for the development team’s experiences using it.

The cooperation between S Group and Nitor started with ABC-mobile

S Group and Nitor have been cooperating since 2017. The cooperation that started with the development of ABC-mobile has intensified and expanded to encompass various lines of business S Group operates in, such as retail trade and banking. Nitor’s digital engineers work with S Group employees in technology, design, agility and analytics projects. Nitor’s strategic expertise has also been utilised in the development of enterprise architecture.

The success of the partnership is based on a mutual understanding of the importance of an agile ability to change and the role of customer insight and needs as a starting point for development.

The collaboration with Nitor has been really good. Together, we form a great team that isn’t afraid to set the bar high. Everything comes down to people. Our goal is to help customers in their everyday life, make their journeys smoother and offer them better services.