Santanu Purohit

Many far-reaching trends accentuated by the rise of alternative energy, emerging models in mobility, and heightened customer expectations converging around convenience and personalisation are disrupting the retail fuel markets worldwide. Customers express the need to recognise each individual and tailor products & services. Digital plays a dominant role in the emerging scenario. Customer buying behaviour is changing over time with the advancement of technology. Accordingly, drivers influencing the customer experience have also evolved. The study aims to find how digital technology has affected customers and provides perspective on customer experience.

Technology advancements significantly impact consumers and industries and wholly transform people's lifestyles and behaviour. While the internet changed how humans interact, the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to change how machines interact. Innovations have been seen in customer engagement and satisfaction in retail, influencing the customers' buying behaviour. IoT, AI, and predictive analytic tools play a significant role in building up customer-facing initiatives leading to the design of service protocols for the enhanced buying experience.

Technology adoption in petro retail is distributed with Automation, IoT, and AI & ML-based technological solutions tried in a scattered way without a centralised view of the entire value chain. Such technology is adopted predominantly towards operational efficiency, improving asset utilisation. However, few usages have been tried to enhance customers' buying behaviour, including customer identification and satisfaction. Adopting a central monitoring system in various sectors showed that the availability of real-time KPI monitoring, AI&ML-driven analytics, and alerts of exceptions of standard Operation processes resulted in achieving operational excellence and building trust in the customer's mind. With the advancement of technology, customer habits, lifestyles, and preferences have shifted and are still evolving. While general retail is exploring technologies like VR for the average customer, petro-retail is yet to catch up. An apparent gap between customer expectations in petro retail vs broad retail context seems to exist. IoT is changing in the Digital era, influencing Customer expectations and managing experience in the petro retail sector in India from both customer & service provider perspectives ( a dyadic approach). The study is one of its kind on the aspect of petro retail.