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Company: Parkland Corporation
Company background: Parkland's purpose is to Power Journeys and Energize Communities. Through our portfolio of trusted and locally relevant food, convenience, retail, commercial and wholesale brands, we serve over one million customers per day across Canada, the United States, the Caribbean region and Central and South America. In addition to leveraging our supply and storage capabilities to provide the essential fuels that our diverse customers rely on, we are a leader in renewable energy and are building an Electric Vehicle (“EV”) charging network to serve growing demand for convenient charging from EV drivers in select markets and decarbonizing through renewable fuels manufacturing, compliance and carbon offsets marketing and trading.
Contact: Vicki Simons
Title: Manager, Customer Insights & Experience
Related URLs: www.parkland.ca
Kudos Category: Rookie of the Year
1. Describe your company and your organization.
Parkland's proven strategy is centered around growing organically, realizing a supply advantage, acquiring prudently, and integrating successfully. We are positioned to lead through the energy transition and are focused on developing our existing business in resilient markets, further diversifying our retail business into food, convenience, and renewable energy solutions (including EV charging), and helping our commercial customers decarbonize their operations. Our strategy is enabled and underpinned by our people, as well as our values of safety, integrity, community, and respect, which are deeply embedded across our organization.
2. Why did you choose to invest in Khoros and what was your experience before making the switch from a previous solution or investing in new technology.
With the rapid growth of Parkland through acquisitions, we were having to manage social marketing and social customer care for over 25 brands, within each of the brand social channels. With the goal of enhancing our digital capabilities, we knew we needed to put a strong focus on maturing our social media presence.
Challenges:
- Regional teams and third-party agencies publishing content and engaging with customer conversations for over 25 brands on each individual brand social channel in silo of each other. The process was very labor intensive, prevented marketing amplification, inconsistent brand messaging, and lack of governance. Reporting was manual, disparate, delayed, and didn’t produce actionable insights.
- Best Practices, metrics and targets are not established. Incapable of using artificial intelligence to prioritize posts, tag conversations or gauge sentiment.
- Reduced opportunity to expand across additional social channels.
- The lack of transparency, communication, and support between teams.
- Unable to follow customer conversations or author profiles.
Khoros proved to understand our business complexity and our need for a strong partnership that we could trust to help us mature over time. Khoros invested many hours prior to Parkland signing the contract to interview, discuss, demonstrate, and listen. Three Khoros modules, Marketing, Intelligence and Care were recommended as a starting point for Parkland to learn what the public was saying about our brands and competitors and to become more effective, efficient, and responsive.
3. What were your goals when investing in Khoros technology and what successes have you already experienced because of the investment? Were you able to gain traction faster than expected? Please include metrics if possible.
Goal 1: A user friendly software solution that allowed for easy adoption across Parkland.
Target: 9 active users by Q4, 2022
Actual: 16 Active Users to-date, across Social Marketing, Care, and Intelligence
Goal 2: Ability to publish content across multiple brands, on multiple channels, from a centralized hub, while increasing visibility, collaboration, and governance. Utilize intelligence to inform campaigns and content strategy.
Target: Go live across all three regions; Canada, US, Caribbean by Q4, 2022
Actual: Integrated 49 source channels, for 12 brands across Canada, Caribbean and the US
We held a kickoff presentation in Q4, 2021 for Khoros Intelligence, partnering with the Khoros Strategic Services Team. Stakeholder interviews were conducted to understand Parkland goals and strategies. The team used Intelligence to build searches and share insights across selected brands and provided recommendations using best practices. The insights identified three key areas: Keep doing, Start doing, Stop doing.
Goal 3: Manage all social engagement and monitor agent activity from one place, with the ability to customize teams and working queues, to improve performance efficiency and increase response rate.
Target: Ingest social and google reviews into a common platform by Q2, 2022
Actual: Launched Care in May 2022. First three weeks data in May:
Canada, 8274 Incoming Posts, 48% Closed Engaged
International, 179 Incoming Posts, 5% Closed Engaged
USA, 11 Incoming Posts, 22% Closed Engaged
Goal 4: Dynamic, customizable, and shareable reporting dashboards that provide transparency and insight into customer conversations. Identify and understand metrics that will drive customer centricity and set consistent targets across all teams by the end of Q4, 2022.
Actual: Utilizing report templates to gain visibility into Care activity. Building customized reports to share across the broader team.
Goal 5: Ability to integrate with CRM for case management and pull Care data into Parkland's Data Lake through an open API.
Target: by end of Q4, 2022 or early 2023
Summary of Achievements
- Integrated 49 channel sources across 12 brands
- Trained 16 active users
- Successfully managing the publishing of marketing content with improved efficiency, collaboration and governance
- Using priority rules and tagging to monitor and respond to customer conversations
- Utilized report templates to build dashboards and gain insights quickly and easily
Customer Testimonial
Collaboration, Governance and Transparency, have all improved a lot.
- These three elements have been improved in several ways. Efficiency is a primary driver – with everything now in one platform reviewing, commenting, and ensuring the content being produced by our third-party agency is accurate and of good quality is simple.
- Transparency has also improved, as I’m able to view the actual post before approving. Prior to Khoros a copy of the image/video would be sent separately.
Mark Neufeld | Marketing Specialist, Social & Digital
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