Grocery Retailers: Consumers Trust You With Their Data, Only To A Certain Point, And Here’s Why!

It's been a while that grocery shopping has become a part of the eCommerce online shopping parties. Although this happened some time ago, this online grocery shopping has risen during the pandemic. These online services were lifesavers back then, and these websites made food accessible to us and let us buy food online. 

Like all the available eCommerce websites, online grocery shopping websites also ask for consumers' data. Research has revealed that nearly 70% of consumers are ready to share their personal information on grocery websites.

It is pronounced that the consumers will genuinely trust the grocery websites. After all, it's something they use daily because everybody has to eat. They are constant visitors, and grocery retailers can figure out their consumer's lifestyles the most. Therefore, retailers are making attractive investments in data analytics to translate their consumers’ data and make their shopping experience unique and personalized. 

Apart from that, the analysis of their data would also help them provide timely insights about their habits and preferences, thereby helping them to optimize product ranges and supply chains. Of course, this can only happen when consumers can trust the websites with their data, but only to the point that they aren't misused or misled or have any privacy breaches. 

There are some things that retailers should know and implement before they ask for critical information about consumers. They are -

Gaining Trust Is The Proper Way Of Doing It - There are multiple difficulties that grocers need to face before making a stark difference in their businesses using the consumer's data. The way to remove these hurdles is by gaining trust. There is a 4 step guide on building up confidence in consumers' minds to be convinced to share non-conventional, personal data. 

1. Promote Transparency - Trust is gained by demonstrating sincerity and openness consistently. Apps generally show privacy policies during the sign-up process. Still, the majority of the people skip this part by accepting the option of facing the consequences if the privacy policies are violated. 

This allows an opportunity to reset consumers' expectations. Grocers have a brief time window before setting up new privacy policies according to consumers' expectations. These new policies require demonstrations on improving their data protection and security measurements. 

2. Empowering consumers - Once the data policies have been published to the consumers, the next thing the retailers need to take care of is to make options visible and accessible so that they can edit, change, or remove any information they want at their desired time. This assures them and gives them a sense of control over their data which is effective for gaining trust. 

Next to these self-management tools should be adding additional information to their account available. This should also be at the consumer's liberty, and grocers should ensure that these other data would only be used to improve and further personalize their experience. 

3. Providing the customers with new benefits - It has been found in a survey that a significant percentage of consumers don't try out new technologies or policies if they don't understand their use of them. Therefore, it is critical to demonstrate the benefits attached to every new technology, which will help increase consumer engagement. 

Often, they also back out due to perceived risks, so it is also an added responsibility of the retailers to make it clear that none of the technical changes causes any harm or breach of privacy in any form. 

4. Letting customer's lead - Once the benefits and consumer value have been demonstrated, these would help encourage adaptation to new behaviors and technology, as we mentioned above. This would help achieve solid commercial returns and enhance store efficiency. Like privacy policies, data management, contribution tools, and data visualization also play critical roles in building trust.

We have talked about how sharing the data would be beneficial. It would help personalize the user's experience and provide the correct combination of tools and suggestions by understanding their shopping pattern. Some can even help curate diet charts or make food suggestions according to the health details. This would make the consumer's experience happy, and he would be willing to use it again. 

Conclusion!

With benefits comes the disadvantages that the consumers might face because of sharing their data. The burden is a breach of data or data leakage. We had already mentioned it before. Due to this fast and growing technology, often some data breaches compromise the safety and security of the consumer's data, and their privacy is compromised. 

To take control of this, the grocers should maintain a facility of sending messages to alert them. Also, they should mention the remediation steps that have been taken to ensure that their data is still encrypted and kept safe with them despite the breach.