Over the past few years, organizations and individuals have had to fast adapt to the unexpected paradigm shifts spurred by the Corona pandemic. While lockdowns and the social distancing mandates affected companies of all sizes and industries, technology is the savior. This trend of new digital innovation will continue developing significant economic value and revolutionize professional practices in India.
From enabling seamless communication between employees or strengthening cybersecurity measures and enhancing productivity, emerging technology solutions have perfectly served every industry. The multi-faceted profits of technologies like cloud, IoT, AI, and ML have compelled leaders to embark on digital business journeys to cope with the pandemic.
The High Time for Business Transformation
With your customers and workforce spending more time engaging and working through the digital channels, transformation across all the areas of your businesses has become an important reason than ever before. It is crucial to connect with your clients where they are, offering the experience they expect, and to run your business in the long term efficiently. Here are some helpful ideas worth adopting.
1. Understanding Customer Needs
Consumer behavior is changing very fast and unpredictably amid impactful changes brought on during pandemic. This makes it even more important for the advertisers always to understand what consumers are looking for and which retail groups are rising fast to adjust their services accordingly.
2. Being More Agile
COVID-19 saw many businesses swiftly tailoring their campaigns to display the right creativity at the perfect time. Some even adopted fully by moving into the new areas in response to dynamic consumer demand. Being fast and agile is appropriate and valuable during the pandemic and helps advertisers be more ready for any change in the future.
3. Analyzing the First-Party Data
First-party data — information received from customers through CRM and other touchpoints — can be a severe step to improving your overall digital marketing capabilities, adapting to a new world, and building a firm base for the future. This data is unique to your brand and provides clear insights into your clients and the types of goods or services they want. You can leverage first-party data responsibly by developing a transparent value exchange with your customers. This will assist you in building better online experiences, strengthen the relationships, and ultimately result in better conversions and higher return on investment.
4. Reimagining Business Model
Many advertisers will have focused on applying short-term solutions to the challenges impacting the business in a fast-changing environment. As we move to a recovery phase, it’s time to dream big and use them as building blocks for a reimagined, more supple business model. Automation can be a helpful tool here to capture dynamic demand in the most well-organized way and derive even more value from the marketing spend.
5. Achieving Successful & Sustainable Business Being Digital
The Indian digital consumption market is among the biggest and fastest-growing globally. Analysing the present trends, it is expected that India will have around 800 million internet users and 700 million smartphones by 2023. These numbers replicate great opportunities for companies and reveal the prevalence of empowered clients who have expected from a brand in terms of service and expectations. Similar changes in expectations are visible within the workforce as well. Research says that more employees wish to continue to work remotely and demand corporate flexibility even after the Corona pandemic recedes. For a company looking to leverage this digital rush to its advantage, the need to maximize digital potential is compulsory. The key to which lies in accurate planning and efficient digital adoption enhanced by futuristic tools like the ERP and cloud.
7. Taking the Lead in Digitalization with Cloud ERP
One of the unforeseen results of COVID-19 was the absolute speed at which businesses had to adopt remote working practices. Currently, remote working is here to stay, and consumers are highly expecting smooth online services. Organizations that need to execute the key processes, handle complex systems, analyze data spread across the various locations, or effectively collaborate need a robust infrastructure to flourish. Here, the flexible cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform fcan develop a difference. It can simplify processes, enhance compliance with internal controls, boost up a data-driven decision-making culture, and assist organizations in cutting costs through better technology integration.
Benefits of Cloud ERP
The significant benefits that help a company streamlines and it’s scale operations are:
Greater Visibility Into Your Business Operations
Companies must focus on merging all core business functions by making a single source of truth for all the information that’s effortlessly accessible to all stakeholders as well as secure. However, disparate legacy systems cannot provide the right, actionable, and comprehensive insights into business operations. This makes gathering information from various business units’ error-prone, resource-intensive, and costly. Thus, organizations are always on the back foot when it comes to decision-making, not sure of their data’s reliability, timeliness, and relevance.
Implementing a centralized ERP solution assures decision-makers that the information they get is accurate and current. Enhancing organizational visibility enables faster and more operative decision-making, which helps a business respond fast to changes in market conditions and customer requirements.
Reduced Business Costs and Increased Productivity
Keeping the price in check has been a constant priority for businesses everywhere. Compared to the traditional solutions, cloud ERP is more profitable in the upfront stage and has a lower total cost of ownership. Furthermore, the cloud offers additional tasks to upgrade depending on the type of managed service a business selects. This, backed with ERP’s automation skills, can help the organizations reduce the workload of internal resources and free up IT staff for proper strategic planning.
Greater Workplace Diversity
Cloud ERP systems foster seamless collaborations and stimulate a diverse workplace culture by offering mobile device support. This helps real-time access to data and collaborations whether a user is at home, in the office, or anywhere else. In other words, the ERP systems make it possible for a business to implement as well as handle hybrid work models and diverse global teams in a better way.
Charting the Forthcoming e-commerce
Better dialogue and collaboration are required to identify new pathways for a digital economy. The UNCTAD-led eTrade for all initiative, presently funded by Germany, Netherlands, and Estonia, is one such platform for doing so. In these years, the initiative has served as a global helpdesk for the developing countries to tie the knowledge gap on e-commerce information and resources and catalyze partnerships among its partners. Since the pandemic outbreak, more than 30 eTrade for all partners have worked together to raise awareness of the e-commerce prospects and risks arising during the crisis. They have also identified ways in which companies in developing and least developed countries could handle the challenges.
Conclusion
The COVID-19 repository was launched in the fall of 2020, and the new COVID-19 and e-commerce report are the initiative’s newest collective efforts to develop a sustainable digital future.
During the early days of this pandemic, e-commerce was one of the important stories in business. Lockdowns and public-health concerns for the retail workers and consumers alike resulted in a mass migration to online sales. The business after pandemic has essentially squeezed ten years of digital sales penetration into three months. Success will require a concerted, organization-wide effort. The good news: our analysis identified some familiar trends among the leading retailers and highlighted four imperatives that can point organizations down the path to profitability.
