As Ampol Australia continues the rollout of its rebrand across the network, extending its food and beverage offer to customers through its partnership with Woolworths, and implementing its sustainability strategy, Executive General Manager Joanne Taylor talks to Convenience World in an exclusive interview.
What has been the greatest lesson to date, navigating through this pandemic? Have there been any new challenges presented in 2021?
For the whole retail business, we’ve learnt and applied greater agility.
From the first outbreak of Covid last year, it obviously had an impact on our business. We saw the impact of restrictions and reduced mobility around the country. The team came together to address how can we think differently? What is it that our customers need during this time and how can we make sure we deliver it?
Working with our suppliers and partners to make sure that we could do that at speed and focus on what was required from our customers wherever they lived was a really important lesson for the business, and it’s that agility that we built in and continue to build into our DNA.
In terms of new challenges, the piece for us is that the restrictions in each state keep evolving. We have an emergency management team that do an outstanding job responding, each time, to those changes. We’ve improved the way in which we communicate across the business and to our stores to make sure we’re staying across those changes.
The final piece is the welfare of our people. Our team members are on the frontline. This pandemic has gone on a lot longer than any of us would have anticipated, and making sure we’re focused on people having the right breaks and also looking after their safety and the safety of our customers is front of mind.
What’s next for Ampol and the outlook for the rest of the year?
Our big focus is on the rebrand. We’re already past the 500 mark in terms of the number of sites we’ve rebranded, and well and truly on our journey to complete the rebrand across our whole network by the end of next year. That really is a great opportunity for us in tandem with our marketing initiatives to ensure that Ampol is recognised as Australia’s leading petrol and convenience brand and first choice for our customers and being one of the true Australian owned and operated, integrated fuel and energy providers.
The other component is around future energy, so really making sure that not only are we providing our customers’ needs today, but we’re also clearing our ability to transition our customers to future and alternative energies, whether they be EVs and charging opportunities that we’ll be able to leverage across our sites, or alternative energies like hydrogen, particularly with our B2B customers, and ensure we focus on that.
We’ll also continue to grow our partnership with Woolworths and continue to explore more opportunities to bring fresh QSR offers to market.
Read the exclusive interview in full in the September/October issue of Convenience World.
