A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.

Chief Technology Officer at Advance Auto Parts

How An Engineering Mindset Can Deliver Winning Customer Experiences

When most of us think about IT departments, we think of large teams of people working on enterprise application software driving overall business performance. These projects require large capital expenditures and months, if not years, to develop, install or customize. When I arrived at Advance, we put many such projects in the pipeline as we were working to integrate four disparate business units into one as part of our business transformation. From supply chain integration to payroll systems to talent management, the opportunities for improvement were endless and urgent. At the same time, I knew from day one that the scale of work to be done on multiple levels also demanded that we hire IT professionals that could be responsive and feel empowered to make decisions – team members who were ready and able to jump in when more immediate and specific technology solutions were needed. This accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic as customer expectations quickly changed and continued to be a necessity as the world slowly opened back up. This is one of the reasons that when I am hiring new IT professionals, I look for an “engineering mindset.”

An engineering mindset means we look for team members who can see the bigger picture and are interested in challenging themselves – those who are willing to learn new things in a world that’s moving at a rapid pace. It also means hiring those who operate with speed and agility while leveraging creativity to solve problems. An engineering mindset is something we look for in all our technology hires and something we enable through a culture of continuous learning. It helps our team deliver time and again, especially when we find those unexpected opportunities that can help our frontline team better serve our customers – the end goal of any retailer.

IT professionals at any large company much have the ability and “mindset” to work in an interdisciplinary mode. There have been many times here at Advance when our IT department has worked with other teams to solve timely challenges for the business – whether it be projects that can help us better support customer needs and wants or those that make the role of the field team member easier and more consistent. In each instance, I believe the way our team members employed an engineering mindset helped ensure a positive outcome. Let’s look at a few examples:

1. Relief for customers as fuel prices increased. In early 2022, gas prices began clawing their way higher, causing many consumers to feel pain at the pump. Fuel savings had been an often-requested benefit from our Speed Perks loyalty members, so we teamed up with Shell to create a Speed Perks Gas Rewards program. This required the involvement of many departments, including IT which was charged with adding new functionality to our Speed Perks mobile app in a matter of weeks. The result was savings for customers. In this case, speed and agility were key as the opportunity to address an urgent customer need were increasing as each day passed.

2. Made giving back easier for customers and team members. In 2018, more than $486 million was raised by U.S. retailers via retail point-of-sale campaigns. What’s more, a recent study shows customers give 21% more via round-up at the pin pad versus being asked to contribute by the whole dollar. While in-store fundraising is a longstanding practice at Advance and Carquest stores, we knew we had an opportunity to modernize by installing round-up functionality to drive more customer participation. The added benefit – less need for team members to ask every customer for a donation, enabling them to focus on core job responsibilities. The technology was enabled in a few months, including all-important testing, and proved successful with our 2021 American Heart Association store fundraising campaign raising 20 percent more than the year prior when only manual transactions were available. It was a project many asked to be involved in because of the passion our team members have for supporting our community.

An engineering mindset is something we look for in all our technology hires and something we enable through a culture of continuous learning


3. Delivered a more consistent customer experience. Consistency is an important driver in the customer experience, but with 68,000 team members, most of them being front-and-center with customers every day, it can be challenging to deliver. In partnership with our HR training team, IT found a solution and launched a step-by-step software guidance tool that aids in everyday job responsibilities in our stores. The technology is specifically tied to the product catalog, providing information about products, complementary products to complete a job and when to ask for a customer’s Speed Perks membership, among other things. The program has been widely adopted and is eliminating extra steps to help deliver a more efficient and consistent sales experience that ultimately benefits the customer. It’s the kind of innovation our technology team members regularly identify to improve the way we work.

Creativity, agility, passion and innovation are must-have traits for successful IT professionals, but so is a broad perspective. These traits allow teams to tackle longer-term projects more efficiently, but they also allow teams to quickly pivot when the business demands more timely solutions. At Advance, we hire with an engineering mindset in mind to ensure we are building a strong, capable technology team. While we might not be on the frontline of customer interactions, our work is making the shopping experience better for customers and team members alike, helping Advance meet its business objectives.

The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.