The challenge

Deckel and Moneypenny has designed and managed some iteration of the Delo Truck North American Tour since most of our employees were in grade school. With each new evolution of the truck, we strived to be bigger and better — to use the latest technology and create intriguing and exciting content. Those versions were good for their time, and appreciated by the customers traveling through, but the content was always product first, customer second. We were hopeful, and had good reason to believe, that the customer would engage and listen. But how could we be sure?

This time around, we wanted to put the customer first, with the idea that the conversation starts with his needs and delivers on his interests. It was important to our client that the customer was getting something in exchange for participating in the event. We needed to develop experiences that would provide customer and prospect commercial interest, promote products and services in a format that could be hosted in over 50 locations a year, and enable tracking engagements and purchases that related to each event.

The solution

Introducing the Delo Traveling Technology Lab! Rather than displaying information on monitors mounted throughout the truck, we gamified the stations — making them more interactive, and utilizing virtual and augmented realities. With VR, visitors shrink down and are taken through a heavy-duty diesel engine, following the path of the oil to see how it works to protect the engine. The AR provides attendees x-ray type vision of engine parts to see how those parts operate and where and what kind of lubricant is used for each.

We leveraged these new technologies to incentivize visitors to go from station to station and draw from a broader set of deployment techniques so that the information never got repetitive. We also asked ourselves, “What does the customer want to hear?” Then we designed three categories of stations with the following in mind: “I Don’t Know You,” “You Don’t Know Me,” and “Always Be Closing.” Allow us to explain.

Most importantly, we created a way to track an attendee’s progress throughout the truck. Upon registration for an event, everyone is given a QR code to scan at each station they visit. The QR code allows us to see which stations are visited and how long a person interacts with that station. 

The results

Because of the solution we came up with, we were able to track how many visitors went to each station and how long an attendee interacted with it, as well as how many gallons and dollars were sold because of hosting an event. In total, we had 193 claims (34,045 gallons submitted in 2019), with an average cost per gallon of $11.47. The total rebate value to the customer totaled $108,941.

In the past, the only way to determine how long an attendee spent at a station was to read through feedback from the event host. In general, that time was around 10 minutes. But the QR code scans allowed us to determine that the average time an attendee spent at each station was about 15 minutes. 

Not only did we create an interactive user experience, the client was quite pleased as well: