Insights from leading retail brands on agility, customer-centricity and resilience

In the last one and a half year, the retail industry has undergone tremendous change at various levels—operations, customer behaviour, supply chain and payments being some of the key areas affected. From operations to strategy, organisations have had to face a lot of disruption. Brands from different categories handled the challenges in their own ways. Insights and key takeaways from some leading brands on their journey towards becoming Agile, Customer-Centric & Resilient…

What is changing in retail

• Shorter planning to execution journey
• Shorter Mind to Market, time to market cycles
• Flexible, variable arrangements with partners, employees
• Everything as a service. Products and Services got commoditized.
• Local players are becoming regional, regional players are becoming national.
• Contactless-experience in offline and online activities, including the logistics and supply chain handling of a product.
• Contactless and online payments witnessing a strong momentum as against cash transactions.
• Blurring of the boundary between online and offline.
• Acceleration of all variants of shopping including stores on wheels, store to door, click and collect, and the omni-channel avatars.
• Social media causing obsolescence cycles to be low.
• Technology and tools becoming democratized, modularized and available.
• No more one way of doing business.
• Deeper penetration of e-commerce, digital payments including in tier 2, tier 3 towns.
• Emergence of UPI as a main instrument for digital payments.
• Reducing non-value add in everything a business does.
• New metrics for measurement as word of mouth gives way to social media. NPS not an accurate measure of brand popularity. The equation one detractor will take away one promotor giving way to one detractor will take away several promotors.
• Anything and everything that you will design will be far more input driven and consumer-centric.
• Live commerce becoming mainstream. Interlinking of live commerce and content.

Changes in consumer behaviour

• Health, wellness and comfort top of mind for customers.
• Shift in focus from looking good for others to looking good for oneself.
• Shift from shopping at local stores to branded stores, especially in the tier 2 cities.
• Preference to chat over video / WhatsApp with brands before making purchase decisions in Tier-2, Tier 3 cities.
• Brand loyalties getting fickle, forcing brands to make changes required to become highly customer-centric by investing in technologies and insights that help provide best-in class customer journeys.
• Couch-based consumption of products, services or content becoming norm. OTT taking off in a big way, resulting in brands spending more on digital / more nuanced marketing with mass personalisation.
• Big shift towards solidarity spending with more and more people wanting to be a part of a cause they believe in.
• Change in what propels consumers to shop at a brand whether online, offline. 

Hyper-personalisation

• Hyper-personalisation becoming ever more important.
• Increased use of data to augment offline experience.
• Use of visual AI that mimic a salesperson’s behaviour to read customer preferences.
• Hyper personalisation technologies becoming more affordable and available off the shelf.

In Conclusion

Madhav Nishtala, Director Retail, Industry & Customer Advisory, SAP India

• The whole approach is about connecting customer intimacy back to business operations.
• Tech today is the core glue that binds businesses together and has been a catalyst for transformation.
• With SAP solutions at helm, retailers can offer their consumers the products and personalized shopping experiences they want every time.

 

Strategic priorities

Vineet Jain, COO, V-Mart

• Digitising decision-making
• Introducing endless aisle at stores.
• Automating feedback
• Hyper-personalisation
• Agility in business, reducing planning to execution time

Amit Modak, CEO, P.N Gadgil & Sons Ltd.

• Capacity optimisation
• Investing in inventory visibility
• Educating customers on advantages of shopping with compliant brands

Dharmarajan K, Chief product Officer, Tata CLIQ

• Scaling faster
• Building new lines of businesses
• Moving to a more agile micro-services-based structure to iterate faster and faster release of features for consumers
• Increased focus on security, compliance and privacy
• Hiring best in class tech talent.

Lavanya Nalli, Vice Chairperson, Nalli Group

• Making prudent investments as leaders in technology.
• Achieving true hyper-personalisation
• Doing everything to serve consumers better and follow good business practices in terms of keeping costs as low as possible, reducing waste and increasing efficiencies. All this requires you to have a very strong robust tech-enabled backend and front-end.

Rajgopal Nayak, CTO, Metro Brands Ltd.

• Making business more relevant to consumers
• Being open to new technology

Being ready to constantly embrace change and do whatever it takes to achieve goal number one.