Delivering the Kalibrate Standard: Alexia Field

In this blog series, we take a closer look at how our team supports our clients in achieving their strategic objectives. In some organizations, it might be going ‘above and beyond’ to get the job done – but we just call it ‘the Kalibrate Standard’.

This edition features Alexia Field, Senior Customer Success Manager.

Tell us a little about your role.

As a Senior Customer Success Manager, I work with our major fuel pricing accounts in North America.

My primary function is to ensure our clients are extracting maximum value from their solution. I am our client’s key point of contact at Kalibrate – liaising with internal teams, advising on best practices, and supporting them in achieving their goals in our relationship.

How does your role interact with the rest of the team?

I’m the central point of contact for our clients so I understand a lot about how and why they use Kalibrate Pricing. That makes me the ‘voice of the client’ across the internal teams at Kalibrate.

It starts with the onboarding team – ensuring that a client’s intended usage of the tool is properly configured so, on day one, they’re ready to start gaining value. I also work closely with delivery to install new functionality within client environments and checking that updates match their expectations and serve their needs.

The other part would be ensuring clients’ feedback, be it product improvements, new functionality or prioritization requests, is escalated up to support, operations, and development teams. Effectively, I’m our primary conduit through which the client gets to communicate with the rest of Kalibrate.

What types of problems are the clients you work with trying to solve?

The most frequent question I get is ‘how do I know if what I’m doing is working?’ That could be strategic or tactical. That’s where Kalibrate’s expertise really comes to the fore.

A client may be looking for approaches to make a certain site perform in a certain way. We’re often asked how to analyze a piece of data that a client feels may be important but wants approaches to interpret.

When new strategies have been implemented or changed, I get asked ‘how do we know if it’s been successful?’. Then, we dive into Kalibrate Pricing and look at the reporting and visuals to answer the question. One we get a lot is about benchmarking performance against their competitors at a site or brand level.

I also handle a lot of technical questions around integrating clients’ internal data into Kalibrate Pricing or how to perform specific queries or tasks efficiently in the tool. Clients often ask how they can improve processes and become more efficient.

A final mention is for integration after acquisitions. Many of our clients grow through acquisition – or are acquired themselves – and find themselves with several fuel pricing systems (or spreadsheets!) they need to rationalize into Kalibrate Pricing. Some clients are confident in doing this themselves with Kalibrate doing checks, others want us to handle the entire process.

Give us an example of a particularly challenging client question.

We recently had a 500-site operator that wanted a big overhaul of how they were pricing. They were quite basic in their approach – pricing was almost entirely manual using a set of rules and they wanted to level up to greater sophistication. Part of that was implementing optimization, part of it was being more creative and strategic in their approach.

They had analysts spending excessive amounts of time reviewing data and wanted Kalibrate Pricing to do that for them so the team’s attention could be on exceptions only.

That’s quite unusual. More often, pricing teams have a strategy and ask questions about specific sites or tactics. This client wanted a wholesale upgrade in the sophistication of their entire pricing methodology.

And how did you solve that?

They were anxious to do it all in one ‘big bang’ so the first part of my role really was to assist in understanding the potential pitfalls. The primary use case for optimization isn’t to swing a market position significantly, it was about one to two cent decisions that make a massive impact to the business.

In the end, I advised that we focus on a set of sample sites that we know could benefit from optimization, agree a timeframe, and analyze the results. We used Kalibrate Pricing’s model health visualization to direct the clients towards sites that were best suited to optimization. We also looked at site sensitivity to see which sites shouldn’t be subject to large position changes as it could hurt volume.

I gave them some guidance on the metrics that would be most critical to evaluate success. We looked at before and after status and they were happy with the results. When you’re making a couple of cents extra across hundreds of sites, that really adds up!

The client has now implemented optimization across almost every site in their network. There were a handful of sites that weren’t the right fit – but we’ve been data driven in identifying those, so the approach is really bespoke to that portfolio and their team’s objectives.

I think it would’ve been impossible for the client to overhaul their entire pricing strategy without our team and a tool like Kalibrate Pricing. The volume of data to interpret and the speed at which the market changes would make it impossible to keep up and generate anything truly actionable.

What’s the most rewarding part of your role?

Without doubt, the most rewarding part of my role is the people I work with. I learn so much from them – at least as much as they learn from me. When I help to solve really complicated problems, and we have that collective ‘we did it’ moment – that’s just the best feeling.

A close second would be working with the rest of Kalibrate. We have a very collaborative team – everyone is happy to pitch in, everyone is client-focused – it makes life so much easier when projects get challenging or we have a short turnaround time.