Delivering the Irving Promise

Delivering the Irving Promise

Background Information

Irving Oil Limited was founded in 1924 by K.C. Irving as a small service station in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Canada. Irving was known for exemplary customer service and has expanded successfully over the years. Now Irving Oil has over 7000 employees, 800 retail locations, and refining capacity of 330,000 barrels per day and serves wholesale, commercial and retail customers in Eastern Canada, Quebec, and New England. Irving Oil is comprised of three different business units that run as profit centers: Processing and Transport, Business-to-Business, and Business-to-Consumer. The Convenience Retail (CR) group is part of the Business-to-Consumer business unit and is responsible for the 210 company-owned retail convenience stores. Convenience Retail was divided into three regions, each managed by a region manager. In each region there were area managers who helped and coached eight to fifteen stores and each store had a store manager, assistant manager, shift leader and associates.

Based on strong company values, Irving’s convenience retail strategy was to operate differently than its competition. Irving believed that a clean, well-lit, and well organized store, operated by friendly and helpful staff, would increase demand and grow sales in the region Irving served. The challenge for Irving Oil was implementing it differentiation strategy and they needed a powerful motivational device that would drive front-line employee behaviour. The scorecard development team was responsible for delivering results in line with the “Irving Promise” and needed to decide which metrics should be collected and evaluated on the final scorecard. The members of the scorecard development team needed to deliver the final version of the dynamic business scorecard along with a comprehensive summary of preliminary results from a customer survey pilot. The team felt that analysis of the Voice of the Customer (VOC) pilot data...