Reckoning at Retail: Ride It Out or Reinvent Your Business
Photo by Drew Dau on Unsplash
The challenges faced by brick-and-mortar retailers have accelerated at staggering speed in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis. The latest data from McKinsey shows that consumers are likely to keep the behaviors they’ve adopted amid stay-at-home orders. Retailers can’t afford to be in a wait-and-see mode. They need to reimagine their baseline requirements and then turn their attention to taking their customer experience to the next level.
In a recent article for HBR, The Pandemic is Rewriting The Rules of Retail, Denise Yohn writes that "Retailers need to stop expecting business to return to “normal. There’s no going back to how it was anytime soon."
She highlights the following:
- Retailers have to adapt their brick-and-mortar operations to comply with health-and-safety regulations and meet basic customer expectations.
- Retailers will have to make their in-store experiences even more extraordinary for those who can visit in person.
- This isn’t the time for the retail industry to try to simply ride out the storm. With a more proactive, progressive approach to both digital transformation and a new era of customer experience and service, the future might look less bleary.
Read the full article at HBR