Ranch Market keeps customer data in-house to protect premium service

Diamond Plus members can contact store managers directly for special orders.

Ranch Market is keeping its highest-spending customers’ data in-house to protect the trust and personal service that distinguish its premium supermarket business.

“Trust is the North Star to collaborate with customers or with other parties, whether we share our data or not,” Hiu Kurniawan Saputra, chief of strategic planning and new business development at Ranch Market operator PT Supra Boga Lestari Tbk, told Retail Asia.

Ranch Market operates Diamond Plus, an invitation-only loyalty tier above the Silver, Gold, and Diamond levels of the wider Blibli Tiket Reward programme, which has about 40 million members.

The company created Diamond Plus because Ranch Market customers could reach the wider programme’s Diamond threshold too easily, Saputra said.

Ranch Market does not disclose the requirements for Diamond Plus. Its board decides membership case by case based on how often and how much customers spend.

The company keeps Diamond Plus data on its internal systems. Qualifying customers get a welcome gift at checkout and are introduced to the customer service lead or duty manager rather than receiving an automated notification.

Members receive a personal shopper, can use a mobile checkout service to avoid queues, and can call the store manager directly for orders that need to be prepared in advance.

“We could not give that treatment to all Diamond members—there are too many of them,” Saputra said via Zoom. “It is about finding the threshold between how many people we can serve and how much workload our team can handle.”

Ranch Market limits the information it sends outside the company. It shares product, price, and quantity data with e-commerce partners Blibli and Grab and analytics company The Nielsen Company Indonesia to keep online stock information accurate.

“There is no customer data in there at all—it is purely transaction-related from the product side,” Saputra said.

Ranch Market also keeps customer details from brands running promotions through its stores. Staff members identify customers matching criteria requested by a brand, such as age or shopping habits, without providing their contact details.

Ranch Market then sends the WhatsApp messages or emails itself. Brands receive figures such as the number of messages sent, opened, or rejected rather than individual customer information.

“We will do the blast ourselves,” Saputra said.

Ranch Market follows a similar approach for promotions that reward top spenders. Brands get a ranked list without customer contact details, whilst prizes are distributed through Ranch Market’s app.

When customer data must move between systems, Ranch Market uses outside technology providers certified against international data protection standards.

Data is encrypted whilst being transferred, access expires after a set period, and the information is deleted after it is no longer needed, Saputra said.

Third-party certification bodies audit the providers to check that customer information has been deleted.

Saputra said Ranch Market has adopted stricter internal safeguards than required by Indonesian regulators.

“If we are asked to share data directly, we refuse,” he said. “This is not a trivial matter: it is a criminal offence.”