The global COVID-19 crisis has shaken the personal and corporate being equally. It has caused sudden and drastic changes in the world making it extremely difficult to see through it for a solution. Fear struck consumers, stay-at-home restrictions, minimalistic business operations, and narrowed movements have created a perplexing, uncertain, and volatile market space. While the retail business is heavily struck by the looming deepening global economic recession, management is coping up with the sudden burden of meeting and necessity to take quick actions for survival.
One solution that is potentially serving retail organizations to make faster decisions and simplifying their jobs is digital transformation. Using data and business analytics is providing impeccable insight into the data and empower management with facts and information to derive rapid, profitable decisions. Experts anticipate a compound annual growth rate in the retail automation market to be more than 10% by 2023.
It is not only helping retailers to maintain communication with their customers in the time of social distancing but also enabling unprecedented personalization of services. It is helping to automate and optimize every step of the supply chain to ensure supreme quality service to the customers. With 50% of companies using automation, the industry is already going strong on the path.
Glorious Insights has been partnered with several leading and promising retail businesses and providing them exceptional solutions to craft and lead the way to a new retail industry outlook 2020.
√ Rapid deployment of a digital environment
COVID-19 has turned the retail industry trends 2020 upside down. Companies have to look for ways to empower every decision in the organization at each step. It is important to understand the model business persona to implement a seamless and effective digital transformation. It is crucial to acknowledge the conventional and systematic collection and delegation of information in the organization to understand the core operations.
At Glorious Insight, we study the current working system to identify the pitfalls and understand the requirements. Our domain expertise has helped in completely redesigning the retail operations and workflow to meet the needs of a work-from-home environment. We are partners with the best technology providers including Microsoft, IBM, and many others to facilitate complete automation in retail industry.
Everything from business calls to transactional interactions has rapidly shifted to digital platforms. In just two months of the pandemic, a 12 to 14% increase in online penetration is an indicator of hastening drift towards automation. It is giving rise to a new persona of consumers that are self-service users that prefer swift digital responses and services.
Retail companies have to make a faster movement towards digitalization to stay relevant and profitable in the present retail industry outlook 2020. In the present scenario, the macro narratives are mostly complete and executives have to dig deep into the data to unleash the devil in the details.
Combining the potential of data science, business analytics, and AI and ML-based solutions, retail companies can still get phenomenal insight into customer behavior. These tools are capable of capturing, analyzing, and visualizing useful information about rapidly changing customers' demands and expectations. This accelerated digitization is helping retailers to deliver improved services and continue to flourish despite market slowdown during the pandemic.
√ Rapid decision making and integrated operations
Agility in decision making has become a promising retail industry trend 2020 owing to market volatility due to pandemic. Businesses are experiencing fluctuating customer demands, limited physical store operations, a sudden increase in online interactions, employment loss, market unpredictability, and global recession.
All these factors have completely transformed the retail landscape. The forecast of category, projected demand plans, inventory management, working capital, and operational cost and throughout are all perceived differently. Companies have to re-evaluate these parameters in real-time for constant adaptation to the fluctuations.
Glorious Insight provides an efficient digital transformation with an integrated business planning environment. We enable cross-department collaboration to facilitate high-speed workflow and decision flow. For instance, you can get real-time data for dynamic pricing, seasonal events, competition, advertising, and merchandising and derive market forecast in no time.
For precise and rapid decision-making, it is also important to include the impact of COVID-19 on the health of the employees whether blue-collared or white-collared. Organizations are increasingly using business analytics and data science to make fact-based decisions for greater accuracy. Smart tools and big data analytics helps in reimagining the process of engineering to continue business operations and growth in these testing times.
√ Preserve agility during the crisis
In the present circumstances, the consumers and consumer demands are changing very frequently. Lockdown has also caused significant disruption in the supply chain. This has caused active stockpiling for many retail businesses and CPG suppliers causing difficulty in meeting the customers' requirements. In the Asian and European markets, nearly 60% of the customers are ready to move from traditional in-store purchases to automated shopping.
Digital transformation has become inevitable to enable a comprehensive view of the enterprise and integrated business performance. Real-time and accurate analysis of the market performance of brands and categories over different platforms and in different geographical areas can only be achieved by automation in the retail industry.
Advanced technology is keeping the industry rolling and maintaining the pace even during the pandemic era. It is enabling companies to quickly identify the emerging retail industry trends in 2020. They can initiate rapid actions to address these trends and prosper even during hard times.
Glorious Insight provides an integrated one-spot solution with a multi-dimensional perception of the impact of COVID-19 and redefining processes and bottom line. Elements like AI-based apps, automated emails, unified platform, and insight repository allow any time anywhere access to important stats and information to accelerate decision making. The collaborative interface enables visualization and sharing of reports in real-time to reflect the decision throughout the enterprise.
√ Progressing from data to decision using technology
The journey from data to the decision is complex and is an ongoing evolution as the companies flourish. Glorious Insight makes the transition straightforward and comprehensive to establish a new retail industry outlook 2020 during and post COVID. Nearly 8 to 10% of retail companies have adapted the technological reforms within one month of the crisis. We deploy the power of AI, ML, and big data to deliver the finest data analytics and business intelligence into your operations.
Technology provides powerful tools for fact-based fast decision-making that leverage and consumes the right data. Truthful sources of data help in precisely establishing topline and bottom line use cases during the uncertainty of the pandemic.
Glorious Insight uses data accelerators to capture and synchronize all sorts of data including structured and unstructured, internal and external, physical, or virtual. With our systems, you can identify patterns, make forecasts, recognize anomalies, and make immediate amendments for rectification. We keep the process simple by deploying solutions with user-friendly interfaces and emphasizing familiar technologies for a smooth transition.
Conclusion
Although the global spread of COVID-19 has caused turbulence in the retail market, it is motivating companies to move towards the technology-based operation. The crisis is marking a new era with a completely remodeled retail industry.
Technology has made it possible to provide vital information to the executives on their personal devices to deliberate and make rapid action strategies. Workforce can be freed by allowing intelligent automation to do the daily operations and let them focus on more valued innovations.
Predictions based on intuitions and experience are being replaced by more informed judgments. Analytics process legacy data and real-time market information to provide insight for accurate and timely forecasts. All these advancements are redefining the industry and helping companies to achieve unparalleled progress.
