What Fuel, Coffee, and Hot Dogs Have to Do with Generative AI

With AI assistants now automating customer service, writing scripts, and balancing budgets, the business uses of generative AI seem endless. Yet, AI outcomes directly depend on having the right input data. Ideas and prompts matter more than you may think. The truth is simple: Your output will only be as innovative as your input.

By anchoring into this digital transformation best practice, oil and gas giant MOL Group used generative AI to boost hot dog and coffee sales across Central Eastern Europe.

What do coffee and hot dogs have to do with oil and gas? For MOL, the connection relies on using data to understand customer needs, and expanding the business to meet them.

The data behind the shopping basket

Consumer behavior, transactions, and expectations are increasingly digital. Let’s take a look at the numbers to better understand the scale of this trend. According to the Salesforce State of Commerce report:

The data shows that businesses in all industries can benefit from embracing the latest technologies. Even those who offer physical products, like food or gas retailers, can benefit from digital expansion and marketing tactics. Taking an innovative approach to using this technology can result in outcomes that are better than expected. MOL Group studied this data and determined that using AI would help them achieve business and customer success.

Increasing loyalty with AI-driven personalization

MOL Group’s digital transformation began a few years ago, when they decided to make the switch from being a traditional fuel retailer to a digitally driven consumer goods retailer and integrated mobility service provider. “Our vision for MOL Group is to evolve our service station from a place where you just fill up your car to a place where you want to go on your journey,” says István Mag, Head of Digital Factory, MOL Group.

As much as the team desired to realize this vision, they understood that if they didn’t adopt a behavior-based marketing model, they would not be able to build the loyalty and retail experiences needed to make customer journeys memorable.

To create its new loyalty and customer engagement platform, MOL Group teamed up with Salesforce consulting partner IBM, who helped them pull data from over 5 million loyalty shopping transactions each month. Data points came from a variety of sources, including Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, CRM, and third-party data into the customer profiles. MOL Group selected the IBM watsonx AI and data platform to help connect and harmonize all relevant data sources into Data Cloud. With the data all in one place, they could increase customer margins while cross-selling and upselling their hero products by building sophisticated customer management and data capabilities. 

“Partnering with IBM was essential, because they acted as a strategic partner, providing us with the necessary expertise and engineering capabilities to develop our Salesforce platform and roll it out across many countries,” Mag says.

The digital platform they built allowed them to offer their customers a better experience through:

• A powerful mobile app
• Personal discount vouchers
• Easy payment options
• A loyalty program to reward returning customers

With Data Cloud as the foundational capability for generative AI fully implemented, IBM also helped MOL Group analyze behavioral signals from customers with a hyperpersonalization engine.

According to Zsuzsanna Bolgár, Senior Salesforce Marketing Cloud Consultant at MOL Group, “This Salesforce hyperpersonalization allows us to get very sophisticated microsegments within strategic segments with different given personas related to different measures like coffee consumption or how often they buy groceries.”

Putting data to good use

MOL Group set out to increase customer loyalty further. In partnership with IBM, they built a digital loyalty platform based on Salesforce. They determined these insights could help them offer personalized experiences.

• The starting point: With dashboards to organize their existing data, MOL Group could screen shopping frequency levels and baskets and customize actions for their customer segments. For example, if a customer typically visits twice per month, they would be offered a reward for a third monthly visit. 
• The hypothesis for use of AI: Data Cloud and generative AI can be used to further enhance and sophisticate the audience segmentation and offer hyperpersonalized communication and offers within the current loyalty program. The business goal was to increase consumer purchase frequency and basket size.
• AI pilot format: MOL Group created a strategic customer segment around coffee buyers. Its makeup included 15 microsegments, 15 personas, and 15 messages for coffee segments using Data Cloud. This helped them A/B test subject lines to discover their customers’ preferences and work on personalization.
• Results: By adding AI to their existing CRM with the help of IBM, MOL Group was able to get even closer to their customer. They built their pilot with Salesforce technology, including Salesforce for Retail and Marketing Cloud. The software acts as both an omnichannel digital marketing platform and a personalization engine. The latest technology does more than store data in the cloud. For example, MOL Group’s marketers used these capabilities to enhance customer profiles, A/B test content, send pushes, and translate notifications into multiple languages.
• Looking forward: The pilot program is currently active in Hungary, but the platform can be expanded to other countries seamlessly.

“By turning Data Cloud and Databricks customer data into microsegment personas with feature engineering, we built a new Salesforce Marketer Workbench to interact with creative capabilities of generative AI. We further used the IBM watsonx AI platform to manage large language models supporting Eastern European languages. This enabled MOL to safely utilize Gen AI capabilities for campaign managers to generate hyperpersonalized emails, push notifications in local language in one click.”

-Darije Ramljak, Associate Partner, IBM Consulting

Get creative with your digital transformation

“The strategic segmentation we employed adds significant value, driving personalized campaigns with redemption rates and ROI which are multiple times higher than those of general campaigns, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction.”

-István Mag, Head of Digital Factory at MOL Group

An innovative approach to AI and hyperpersonalization made a huge impact on MOL Group. Next time you brainstorm the best ways to use AI for your business, try to think outside the box. Be open to seemingly unrelated responses. Try to vary your prompt style and iterate with each result. Remember that instead of existing solely within the internet, AI can impact tangible items,  even fuel, coffee, and hot dogs.