User Experience Across Markets
In a market as diverse as Europe, with different languages and priorities and needs, how do we know what a good forecourt experience looks like? At RTC Europe, Fabrizio Tarlini, Invenco’s Portfolio Strategy Director, led a plenary session on Europe’s complexity, outlining how the evolution of payment leads the challenge of creating a good customer experience when expectations and anything but uniform.
Europe is not one market, and customer experience proves it
It is easy to talk about Europe as if it is a single place - one region, one set of customers, with one direction of travel - but anyone who operates across borders knows that is not how it feels on the ground.
A forecourt journey in the Nordics does not look like one in Italy. Germany has its own expectations. Eastern Europe is evolving quickly, but differently. Even the role of the convenience store shifts market by market.
Europe is a collection of very different habits, regulations, and retail models. That diversity is part of its strength, but it also makes one question harder to answer.
How do you deliver a good customer experience across all of it?
Payment is where this complexity shows up first
Few parts of the forecourt experience have evolved as quickly as payment.
In a relatively short period, the industry has moved from cash to magnetic stripe, to chip and pin, to contactless, and now toward tokenisation, mobile apps, and new forms of digital identity.
The pace is real, and operators cannot ignore it. At the same time, the past has not disappeared. Cash is still important in some markets. Fleet and fuel cards transition at different speeds. Customer expectations are not uniform.
This is the European challenge in miniature. You are serving the future and the present at once.
Customer Experience is Different Depending on Where You Are
Across Europe, the same site format can mean very different things.
In some countries, unattended payment is normal. In others, it is rare. Italy and the Nordics have widely adopted self-service payment, while Germany remains more traditional in many areas.
The convenience offer also varies. Some markets expect a strong in-store experience. Others remain fuel-led. In Germany, the relationship between fuel and shop sales is different again, shaping why certain models persist.
The user experience is not just changing over time - it is changing across geography.
That means “good” cannot be one fixed design.
What Does Good Look Like?
Good looks like flexibility built into the foundation of the retail experience.
In the keynote discussion, Fabrizio Tarlini described a simple reality: operators need to follow the pace of evolving payment technology, while serving a hyper differentiated population of users and habits.
This is an infrastructure opportunity.
Good customer experience across Europe comes from systems that allow you to adapt without starting over.
It means having the ability to support different levels of interaction. A simple tap and go journey in one location, and a richer experience in another, depending on what the site needs.
It means being able to customise the experience, so you are not locked into one static approach as expectations shift.
And it means modularity, because payment technology changes faster than the rest of the environment. Operators should not be forced into replacing everything just to keep up with one part of the system.
That is what good looks like in practice. Not one experience everywhere, but the ability to deliver the right experience in each market.
The future will reward operators who design for variation
The European forecourt will not converge into a single model. It will remain diverse: multi-energy, multi-format, shaped by local habits and competitive realities. The operators who lead will be the ones who accept that diversity early, and invest in solutions that flex with it.
Consistency will not come from uniformity. It will come from infrastructure that can adapt, market by market, while still feeling coherent for the customer.
That is the real challenge, and the real opportunity, of creating a positive user experience across Europe.
Explore what flexible customer experience infrastructure could look like in your market.