ACI: Today’s Consumers Expect Grocers To Bring The Brand To Them

With the digital shift revolutionizing the grocery industry, brick-and-mortar is no longer the distinct channel it was in the early days of eGrocery. With online grocery advancing rapidly, expanding across the globe and raising funds by the billions, traditional grocery stores risk falling behind if they do not adapt the in-store experience for today’s digitally accustomed consumer.

Conversely, technologies that seamlessly integrate eCommerce capabilities into the shopper journey have the ability to win shoppers’ loyalty, combining digital convenience with the immersion and discovery of the physical experience. Bobby Koscheski, head of omnichannel solutions, grocery and general retail at digital payments software company ACI Worldwide, spoke with PYMNTS about how grocery technology is evolving to keep up with the rise in online and hybrid food shopping and to propel it into the future.

“The unique situation that we believe grocers find themselves in is catering to these omnichannel customers,” Koscheski said, pointing to findings from the Omnichannel Grocery Report, a PYMNTS and ACI collaboration, indicating that while 80 percent of consumers still shop for groceries in stores, 64 percent use digital channels for grocery purchases. “They expect to be able to get the use of their digital channels wherever and whenever they want — even when they’re in the store, in their car, at home at work, whatever … That’s probably the biggest thing that we see happening — this convergence of digital with the physical storefront.”

I’m With The Brand

While having the most up-to-date technology may seem impressive, it turns out that the real trick is to let these innovations stay in the background, foregrounding the brand. After all, it is the grocery brand — be it Kroger, Walmart, Albertsons, Sainsbury, Morrisons or another chain — to which consumers feel most connected.

“Digital customers don’t think of channels or devices or stores, for that matter. They think of brands,” said Koscheski. “The technology or the physical part of this shouldn’t be the focus of the journey – it’s really the experience.”

To make the most of this brand focus, grocers are tasked with integrating all shopping channels so that the experience feels seamless across platforms. Digital accounts and loyalty programs need to translate across shopping journeys, as does brand identity, creating an experience that moves without friction between stores, mobile apps, desktop sites, voice-powered devices and other channels.

As Koscheski put it, “It’s an experience that should be choreographed and orchestrated by the merchant.”

Safe And Sound

With companies gathering so much data about consumers, including sensitive information such as credit card numbers, security concerns abound. Major grocers have had their data breached since the start of 2021, leaving consumers vulnerable. ACI addresses this problem with its omni-tokens, which provide point-to-point encryption (P2PE) to protect data from the time of transaction and store sensitive information as tokens.

“If somebody steals a token, it doesn’t matter — it’s just a number that ties back to a real card,” noted Koscheski.

Consumers are growing increasingly aware of these security concerns. PYMNTS’ May Securing eCommerce study, created in collaboration with NuData, finds that almost half of all eCommerce customers report being more worried about fraud and data theft now than they were before the pandemic began. Additionally, 65 percent of these shoppers say that experiencing even one data security breach would prompt them to stop making purchases from the merchant in question altogether.

Koscheski added that by linking these tokens to consumers’ various card numbers, they can seamlessly adapt to changes in payment information without the consumer having to re-input that information. Additionally, these tokens provide merchants with more data about how customers are paying, since they can match tokens to different payment accounts.

“A lot of our customers are using that to do analytics and figure out who’s doing what within their base,” he explained. “That’s another area of innovation that’s been quite unique — well beyond data security.”

Here And Now

Among the leading solutions in omnichannel grocery, empowering customers to move through physical stores with the convenience and control of online shopping, are pay-on-the-spot tools that allow customers to check out as they shop through their mobile devices.

“The grocer’s customer is able to scan items in the aisle, or even before they come into the store — those items could be from a bar code, a produce waystation, a kiosk or from an online website — then get that into their app and check out whenever they’re ready,” Koscheski said. He noted that these features allow grocers to “weav[e] that payment experience” into the commerce journey, satisfying consumers’ expectations that brands will meet them where they are.

Looking ahead, he believes that services such as Zelle, which currently are primarily used for instant person-to-person (P2P) or business-to-business (B2B) payments, “will appear in the merchant space in the next three years,” enabling immediate payment processing.

Ultimately, by making the experience seamless and immediate, these innovations will satisfy consumers’ desire for a shopping journey that is as simple and invisible as possible.

“The idea is that [digital customers] don’t want to have to think about it,” said Koscheski. “For them, it’s just part of that engagement with the brand. It’s what they expect to do. And it doesn’t matter where they are … [They expect] to engage in a way that’s consistent across the board.”