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Following the launch of its report The 20 Most Trusted UK Retailers with Retail Week, Okta’s solutions director Ian Lowe outlines what this research reveals about how retailers should approach getting consumer buy-in.
Our recent survey with Retail Week revealed that Amazon is now the UK’s most trusted retail brand, despite being one of the youngest companies to feature as part of The 20 Most Trusted UK Retailers report.
The top five also included Tesco, John Lewis, Asda and M&S, which share a combined age of 468 years compared with Amazon’s 27, indicating a turning point in customer attitudes towards trust.
While reputation and establishment defined a brand’s trustworthiness in the pre-digital era, we’re now shifting towards a new reality where user experience and ever-increasing consumer demands strongly influence behaviour and buying decisions.
Instead of trusting brands they know, customers trust brands that know them – but what factors are driving these changes and what solutions can retailers embrace to retain that trust?
Securing trust in the future of retail
Even before the pandemic hit, a retail revolution was well underway. Driven by rapid device proliferation and high-speed internet at scale, customer expectations have moved beyond bricks-and-mortar stores towards an omnichannel world without limits.
58% of consumers are highly conscious about their safety when shopping online
Today, customers demand the freedom to shop whenever they like on whatever device or app they choose – but this is not their only concern
According to the report, 58% of consumers are highly conscious about their safety when shopping online and cite identity theft, particularly of financial data, as a significant concern.
Additionally, 58% worry about the vulnerability of passwords, suggesting traditional identification methods no longer instil the confidence they once did.
To secure and retain consumer trust, retailers must balance the scale between freedom and security, and give customers the seamless shopping experiences they demand while protecting their data from ever-growing cyber threats.
Identity enables digital trust
With surveys suggesting the migration to online shopping will outlast the pandemic, digital identity and its effect on customer experience is high on retailers’ agendas.
By leveraging customer identity access management platforms, organisations can rapidly improve the service they deliver to customers while providing secure, frictionless login experiences that build loyalty and trust.
Learning from Just Eat
Just Eat, one of the UK’s fastest-growing retailers, recently integrated Okta’s Single Sign-on and Multi-factor Authentication to enable fast and secure logins to 40 applications, allowing more than 155,000 restaurants to connect with their customers via its platform efficiently.
As well as simplifying the user experience and speeding up operations, these tools add value by mitigating common password-targeted cyberattacks, helping to reassure customers that their data is safe.
In a highly competitive industry, it pays for retailers to invest in a robust identity solution that strengthens security and helps them build better relationships with their customers that go beyond the formalities of sale and transaction.
Retailers can create memorable user experiences that set them apart from the competition, build trust and ensure customers keep coming back, time after time.
For more information on how identity can help modernise retail and prepare retailers for a digital-first future, see Okta’s Just Eat case study.
Ian Lowe is director of solutions, marketing, EMEA at Okta
In his 19-year career, Ian Lowe has become a recognised product marketing and sales enablement leader, having created and launched successful cloud-based identity and access-management solutions used by top technology firms, financial services organisations and governments around the world.
