The home heating oil industry has a long and proud history, and Fuel Oil News has been there supporting it since 1935. It is an industry that has faced many challenges during that time. In its 77th year, Fuel Oil News is doing more than just holding
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www.fueloilnews.com | FUEL OIL NEWS | AUGUST 2016 29 "They're good customers. They're just choosing a different way." Still, full-service marketers are often apprehensive about venturing into the will-call or on-demand business, Stillman acknowledged, and the panel at NEFI Visions discussed that. "The fear is that if you're a full-service company and you start selling online at a competitive price the full-service customers will get pissed off and leave," Stillman noted. The panel talked about how to manage that challenge, concluding, Stillman said, that the way to do it is to "make it clear that on demand is self-service. No frills. You don't get all the bells and whistles of full service. You essentially get fuel, and you get a very convenient online experience. But that's all you're getting. It's another level of service." Energy Edge markets a web-based e-commerce platform called Energy Engine that a number of fuel oil dealers are using to sell to on-demand customers. Robert Spiegel, president of SOS Xtreme Comfort, a full-service dealer in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., uses Energy Engine to run a separate company called Charity Oil, which he founded six years ago and serves as managing member. "I was losing business to what's called the on-demand business," Spiegel said in a phone interview. "I wanted to come up with a way to compete in the on-demand business world but not jeopardize any of my full-service customer base." Spiegel hit on a way to use the Energy Engine software to serve on-demand cus- tomers through Charity Oil, and support his charitable fundraising as well. "We've always had a charity," Spiegel said. "I lost my sister to breast cancer, and we had our own foundation for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in Manhattan." Charity Oil is a company where the fuel is delivered by "caring full-service fuel distributors" in specific zip code areas, Spiegel said. So that it won't erode their full-service customer base, they sell through Charity Oil, which uses a website powered by the Energy Engine software. Participating dealers follow the charita- ble sales approach, Spiegel said, "So they're giving back to the community and also selling on-demand fuel." Charity Oil itself has been operat- ing for five years, Spiegel said. "We went from about 104,000 gallons the first year to 800,000 gallons last winter." Spiegel said that his full-service com- pany, SOS Xtreme Comfort, did lose some customers to Charity Oil, but he said there were some unexpected gains as well. "We did notice a tremendous amount of former SOS customers now are buying from Charity," he said. "We had lost them to other will-call or on-demand companies. We're actually taking some of them back." Spiegel surmised, "They might have been happy with SOS' deliveries, they might have been happy with SOS' service, but maybe they weren't happy with the full-service pricing." In addition—"we didn't expect it to happen as rapidly as it did—it really bolstered our SOS service depart- ment. We actually had to take on some more technicians because the Charity Oil customer base is using SOS for air conditioning service, heating service, electrical service." Charity Oil's approach to marketing, Spiegel said, "is letting customers know that the Charity Oil fuel is being delivered by a philanthropic full-service company in your area. So the customers know that it's being delivered by a full-service company." That approach also helps participating dealers in marketing their full-service business, Spiegel said. On the Charity Oil website "everything is zip-code specific," Spiegel emphasized. A customer on the Charity Oil homep- age is asked for their zip code and once they enter it, the site takes them to the par- ticipating distributor who handles that zip code. Charity Oil and SOS Xtreme Comfort are different companies, Spiegel stressed. He said he wanted to keep the full-service enterprise that is SOS, and the on-demand business that is Charity Oil, apart. l F O N Online e-commerce can help integrate on-demand opportunities into a full-service model.