COVID and Digital transformation in Retail
By: Kaustubh Konkar
Tags: Grocery Retail, Retail, Ecommerce, Data, Online Grocery Shopping

My name is Kaustubh. I have been following, working and innovating in IoT, Data analytics industry now for 6+ years.

My current responsibility is to lead one of Global retail giant for European scope. I feel lucky to lead retail account having scope of Data analytics, data science, workplace, cloud and infrastructure. The reason I feel lucky because I seen pre covid long term approach of digital transformation with business case as primary parameter and during covid forced /necessary digital transformation to meet increase in customer demand.

Background —

I would like to share my experiences of forced digital transformation and want to use medium as platform to brainstorm how to sustain and grow digital transformation momentum to meet each customer demand.

Problem statement-

Pre covid I have read many blogs , keynote speeches talking about digital transformation target group as millennials and addressing their demand. Covid has given opportunity or created necessity to explore e-commerce to every individual buying daily necessities. My opinion part of non-millennials have struggled to get used or learn e-commerce solution because the user experience is not meant to such target group. User experience ranging from opening website/app, adding SKU, adding bank account, redeem bonus points/loyalty points, selecting delivery timeslot and changing timeslot, tracking deliveries, decision to do pay upfront or after pay at doorstep.

Brainstorm solution-

This is my opinion humongous task to quite sizable group individuals. My opinion is current e-commerce and backend data analytics require overhauling to meet customer demand of existing and each potential e-commerce customer. Near future should be in my opinion to look at end to end e-commerce value chain including physical store part of value chain.

How to start -

Executive vision- my view is executives should spend time in understanding user experience requirements and build end to end vision. The user experience vision should be part of core values to run daily business. The user experience core value should translate in to plan cut across finance, category management, supply chain, physical stores, e-commerce and payments.

one of the easiest things can be done is executives should spend atleast 1 hour of their weekly time in understanding social medial reviews, store manager and frontline workers reviews and correlate them to user experience core value to improve.

Another one could be creating gamification scenarios for users to learn and adopt e-commerce new functionality using social media. Training frontline worker about omni channel experience and promote couple of them as user experience manager within stores to promote e-commerce adoption. Boardroom grocery shopping experiment/gamification scenario can be another way to make executive aware of spending time and money on e-commerce and strengthen user experience as core value

This is beyond omnichannel experience. it is in my opinion making your business ready for current and future new normal.

I take this blog as starting point to brainstorm new normal e-commerce solution. I will take deep dive in next blogs to go through end to end value chain