How can Cloud help retailers deliver better personalised customer experiences, with data driven decision techniques?
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
That adage was particularly true for India’s retail sector. The nearly US$900 billion-worth industry was one of the most affected globally from the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple lockdowns that cutoff walk-ins coupled with massive supply chain shortages threatened to kill an industry still making the transition to organised retail.
“The solutions for digital transformation were more or less (already) in existence,” said Livspace’s Ramakant Sharma. “What has happened is the faster adoption of those solutions,” the co-founder of Home interior and renovation platform added. “Because of this pandemic, most of us have been forced to really use those things which were available.”
But having made the pivot to adopting the mass-market technology, it is time to centralise and collate that data by moving it into the cloud. That was a key learning from the panel of industry veterans speaking at the Retail Panel of the The Next Wave Of Cloud Innovation forum organised by Forbes India & Google Cloud.
“Retail is all about the details,” said Accenture India’s Manish Gupta. “From supply chains to the shopping channel, everything now needs to be approached from the lens of timely, targeted, and tailored experiences for customers especially as digital-first shopping journeys are blurring the lines between the physical and digital brand experience,” the managing director and India business head for Consumer Centric Industries added. “Shoppers want to know what’s available before they visit your stores, and they expect a variety of fulfillment options.”
The pandemic cost the Indian retail sector an estimated US$30 billion in lost revenue. But it also sets it up for a strong bounceback; a tech-first approach to emerge as the world’s most technologically savvy retail industry.