French supermarket giant, the Carrefour Group has teamed up with Google to launch a new voice-activated shopping delivery service in France.
The move will make Carrefour the first major supermarket retailer to integrate its services with the Google Assistant, and is aimed at accelerating Carrefour’s eCommerce services and taking on the likes of Amazon.
If successful, executives say the program could be rolled out in markets around the world.
Those who opt in to the service will be able to create a shopping list via the Google Assistant, which is delivered to their door. Carrefour cited research from the CSA and Dadopi study on voice assistants and smart-speakers that claims 46% of the French population already has a voice assistant.
Carrefour has said that the service uses an individual’s existing Google Account, which will use previous purchase history to recommend certain products. In terms of user privacy, the company has said that users “can withdraw their consent at any time and disassociate their accounts. Carrefour will no longer share customer’s purchase history with Google, and Google will delete any data transferred. This happens automatically if the voice-based grocery shopping experience is not used for 30 days.”
Carrefour has more than 12,300 stores across 30 countries worldwide, serving 105 million customers with 380,000 employees. According to a report from Reuters, Carrefour is in the middle of an attempt to boost its profits, with plans to invest 2.8 billion euros into its digital commerce platforms by the end of 2020.
According to that report, Carrefour is “aiming to increase food e-commerce sales to 4.2 billion by 2022 from 1.3 billion euros into 219 and 1.0 billion euros in 2018.”
Google’s Managing Director, Sebastian Missoffe told PYMNTS that “shoppers today are saddled with disconnected experiences through the shopping journey, which often lead to abandoned shopping carts and low customer satisfaction and loyalty.”
“Customers want assistive, simple and personalised experiences that help them make decisions on what to buy, assist with easily building baskets across surfaces, and provide a seamless checkout,” Missoffe concluded.
Amelie Oudeo-Castera, Carrefour’s Director of E-Commerce, Data and Digital Transformation has said that “the partnership developed with Google gives Carrefour a head start in terms of technology and customer experience.”
Francois Loviton, Director of Brands and Commerce at Google France said that “Google’s core business is to provide information and technology that is helpful on a daily basis, and we are proud to have been able to offer an iconic retailer like Carrefour with the best of our technology and expertise to rethink and simplify the grocery shopping experience.”
“Carrefour is the first retailer in the world to integrate voice-based grocery shopping experience on the Google Assistant. This innovation, developed with Google, will further accelerate the trajectory of ecommerce at Carrefour,” she concluded.
The company says it will act in line with GDPR requirements, which allows users to exercise their rights of access, rectification, blocking and erasure of existing data.
