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How grocery retailers can grow after the world reopens

Biz insights

Jun 29. 2020

By Tony Ng
Special to The Nation
As the Covid-19 outbreak spread, customers quickly adapted to social distancing measures by adopting new online methods to buy everyday groceries. Though lockdown measures in Thailand have eased and restaurants and businesses are starting to reopen, online grocery shopping behaviours are here to stay.

Now the habit has formed, consumers will continue to rely on digital-first shopping, though they will still expect the special in-store service they received when shopping in person. Here are five lessons retailers can apply to their businesses going forward.

Lesson 1: Personalised shopping experiences

The goods people buy during a pandemic may not reflect their typical buying habits. Post-pandemic, normal purchasing habits will likely resume. Grocery shopping will go from a long-term play – in which consumers buy groceries to last weeks or months – back to a routine task for in-the-moment purchases.

As purchasing habits shift back, grocers will need to deliver personalised experiences to move more shoppers past transactions and build increased loyalty.

There are three ways grocery retailers can do this.

Artificial intelligence (AI): AI learns from customer data to suggest relevant items based on past and recurring purchases. Connect AI to your customer relationship management (CRM) system to build tailored customer journeys across marketing, commerce, and service.

Customer surveys: Surveys and quizzes let customers tell you exactly what they want – and when they need it. Create email surveys and a section on your site for feedback. Include questions on lifestyle and dietary restrictions to deliver new product options.

Chatbots: Chatbot usage has increased since Covid-19. Besides helping service teams scale, bots can provide curated information for customers. Use bots to set up order subscriptions and recommend products. Bonus: Bots make service agents more efficient because they free them up to focus on higher-value cases.

Lesson 2: Increase pickup options

Consumers will still want flexibility after shelter-in-place orders lift. Continue special considerations and services, including special pickup times and delivery options.

Take curbside pickup a step further. Reserve a certain number of spaces in your parking lot for pickup. Enable customers with an app to schedule their pickups and match them with a time and zone. Let them add their phone numbers to receive text updates. Text ahead of time with a pickup reminder and special instructions. You can also add staff to assist with curbside pickup zones by maximising self-checkout lanes inside the store. Lastly, be sure to embed service so customers can connect with an associate and ask any questions.

Third-party delivery partners will continue to play an integral role. Find ways to evolve the partnership to continue to offer at-home delivery options. For example, make it easier for customers to receive items through subscription-based delivery from the store. Or explore automated vehicles for in-town deliveries.

Lesson 3: Partner with restaurants for wider reach

Restaurants were hit hard during Covid-19 and were quick to collaborate to create new revenue streams. Offer support to the industry by using your business as a platform for change. Create strategic partnerships with restaurants to make a positive impact.

To do this, consider offering ready-made or heat-and-serve restaurant meals. Then cross-promote to both restaurant and grocery customers for maximum reach. If there’s a bundled meal for Taco Tuesday, customers could click one button and add the ingredients to their cart. This expedites the service and creates a seamless experience.

Another approach is to co-create digital content such as recipes, how-to’s, and blogs to increase consumer engagement between purchases. For example, a restaurant that features recipe content on its website can link to online grocery ordering.

Lesson 4: Empower associates to reduce contact risks

During the pandemic, store associates, warehouse workers, and delivery drivers became frontline heroes. Consumers trust and respect companies that recognise and fairly compensate these employees. According to a recent survey, after discounts, safety of employees was the top influencer for shopper purchases and loyalty.

When countries reopen, frontline employees will be tasked with even more safety measures. Empower associates to handle customer questions while reducing contact and risk. For smaller grocers, this may mean scheduling appointments for at-risk in-store shoppers. For larger grocers, formalising training on proper safety and social distancing protocol is key for one-to-one interactions.

Many grocers are implementing ways to reduce employee contact with customers such as encouraging shoppers to pay by card and use self-checkout. Safety screens and increased sanitizing can also protect workers.

Lesson 5: Change how you track inventory

Long delivery times and order substitutions marred the Covid-19 shopping experience. Post-crisis, consumers will have less patience for delays and inconsistencies.

To get ahead of expectations, track inventory the day of the order, not the day of delivery. Remove ordered items from the inventory system and keep them in the back of the store or in a dedicated section of your warehouse. If a customer tried to order an item but it was out-of-stock, notify them if it becomes available before their delivery time, so they can add it.

Evaluate order management capabilities as well. Ingest orders from online and route them to the correct store locations.

Prepare for new shopping habits, future disruptions:

While the future is uncertain, digital commerce will be increasingly important for both large grocers and small shops. Small grocers may actually have an agility advantage without disparate, legacy systems.

Grocery retailers will begin to focus on transformational projects to prepare for future disruptions. Such projects don’t have to take months or even years. For example, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud Quick Start for Grocery and Food Service is a tailored, out-of-the-box solution that has everything you need to offer buy online, pickup and curbside experiences.

Tony Ng is Asean region vice president for Salesforce

#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

Building a safer and stronger normal in Thailand with 5G

Biz insights

Jun 27. 2020David Oxford, Country Director, Nokia Thailand 

By David Oxford
Special to The Nation
The Covid-19 pandemic is the biggest health emergency the world has faced in generations. The unprecedented magnitude of this crisis means everyone is making a concerted effort to improve safety while trying to keep social and economic activities running – from governments and businesses to communities and individuals.

As Thailand is gradually easing movement and business restrictions, the question now is: where does the nation go from here? Talk of a ‘new normal’ is commonplace now, but how exactly will Thailand transition towards it, and how can the nation harness new technologies such as 5G to create a smarter and safer society?

Why Thailand’s technological ambitions are not derailed

Before the pandemic, countries around the world were moving full steam ahead with digital transformation to bring societies to the future and unlock new economic possibilities.

From the outset, it may seem that the Covid-19 outbreak dampened Thailand’s digitalisation ambitions, but the pandemic is, instead, accelerating them. This includes the creation of mobile apps that can identify Covid-19 hotspots and allow people to self-assess their health, in addition to the development of chatbots that the public can communicate with to find out information on the coronavirus and steps to prevent its spread.

These efforts are solidifying the robustness of Thailand’s national healthcare system, which is ranked sixth in the 2019 Global Health Security Index and has been vital to the country’s readiness to weather the pandemic.

Thailand is already working towards building a smarter world. Yet, the challenge now – as the country gears up for its ‘new normal’ – is jumpstarting digital transformation across other key sectors, especially enterprises, although that may require more radical changes.

Adapting for efficiency

Going the radical route is often precipitated by critical periods such as the current pandemic. We have seen drastic changes by global enterprises to support relief efforts, such as scent manufacturers reworking operations to make sanitisers and luxury automakers retooling production lines to create respirators. These may be novel, unprecedented circumstances borne by the Covid-19 spread, but it highlights how important it is for manufacturing and supply chain actors to adapt their resources quickly to solve pressing societal problems.

We need to double down on what these enterprises are already doing, yet at speeds which can help improve their adaptability and supplying solutions to society more quickly. This requires communication service providers (CSPs) – and the enterprises they work with – to harness the move to 5G.

This is – as 5G can give connected enterprises the flexibility and adaptability that provides the gift of time – a valuable commodity under normal circumstances, but an extremely vital one in times like now. With 5G, the digitalisation of industries will reduce the time taken to design and build solutions.

A ‘connected’ enterprise gives it flexibility to quickly retool and change systems on demand. That ‘on-demand change’ can mean leveraging automation and remote operations to rapidly increase output, improve employee safety, and ensure the business continuity that is crucial to the production and distribution of essential products and services.

Network slicing – the essential ingredient to 5G transformation

‘Time to market’ is just as important as ‘time to manufacture’, and the key to 5G enabling rapid deployment of solutions is network slicing. Slicing is not a new concept. Virtual network capabilities have been part of packet networking for decades. However, 5G deployments will extend this virtualisation to an end-to-end and top-to-bottom functional scope, and then embed slicing as a core function of the network. The benefits include the ability to differentiate broad classes of services that require certain characteristics or resource parameters with performance characteristics that fit the needs of new segments – something that conventional one-size-fits-all networks cannot achieve.

With network slicing, 5G can support diverse and extreme requirements for latency, throughput, capacity, and availability. It will enable services that were impractical with previous wireless technologies.

For instance, 5G networks will connect ‘factories of the future’ by creating fully automated and flexible production systems – something that Thailand’s automotive manufacturing sector can leverage to improve its competitive regional position. In healthcare, hospitals can arrange greater telemedicine distribution and even arrange robotic surgeries whereas city governments can use 5G to transform urban transport management via real-time traffic management.

All of this will be possible with 5G – with network slicing support – as it helps aggregate vast amounts of data from multiple, dispersed sources for better insight into operational status. It also allows for new levels of supply chain visibility and transparency, an attribute that could prove highly valuable in pandemic tracing.

Coming out better, faster, and stronger

Fortunately, CSPs in Thailand are taking advantage of 5G’s potential to support efforts to flatten the curve and provide relief to those impacted by lockdown measures.

Such efforts should be lauded, and we are doing our own part to help CSPs and their enterprise customers stay prepared amid the pandemic. Through our Covid-19 network traffic dashboard, we are analysing global network traffic to help them anticipate capacity requirements and optimise resources.

Right now, we must all remain steadfast in enduring Covid-19, but I am confident that we will come out stronger. When we do, 5G is there to help us create a world that is smarter, safer, and – most importantly – prepared to weather this sort of challenge more effectively in the future.

The writer is country director, Nokia Thailand 

#ศาสตร์เกษตรดินปุ๋ย : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

CIMB Thai to focus on quality of loans instead of expansion

Biz insights

Jun 27. 2020

By THE NATION

CIMB Thai Plc will adjust its loan expansion target due to the Covid-19 situation that has had a significant impact on Thai economy, the bank’s president and chief executive officer Adisorn Sermchaiwong said.

“We had set this year’s loan growth target at 12 per cent over last year, but due to the current situation the bank might see no expansion in loans at all,” he said.

“Our mission for this year therefore has to shift from increasing the amount of loans granted to maintaining the quality of loans and focusing on granting loans to target groups that have higher potential,” he said.

“CIMBT also estimates that non-performing loans [NPLs] this year will be at the same level as the previous year despite the Covid-19 outbreak, thanks to the supportive policies of the Bank of Thailand,” added Adisorn. “We aim to maintain NPLs at 4 per cent until the end of 2020 and are planning to sell NPLs of around Bt1 billion to Bt2 billion to achieve the goal.”

Adisorn added that in the past five months the bank has seen over 80 per cent increase in banking transactions on digital platform. “This year we have added more services on digital platform including mobile banking, mutual fund digital buying and digital lending in response to changing customers behaviour in the new normal era,” he said.

“The bank estimates that until the year-end the bank’s transactions via digital platform could rise to 90 per cent of overall transactions.”

“As for the investment budget for 2020, we still maintain the original target of Bt500 million to Bt600 million, with main focus on IT infrastructure,” he added. “Although in the past few months the bank did not invest much in IT due to lockdown measures, towards the end of the year we may invest in other aspects to prepare for the post Covid-19 era.”

CIMBT’s shareholder meeting on Friday (June 26) approved the payment of 2019 interim dividends to shareholders at Bt0.005 per share, amounting to Bt174.11 million.