Lessons on building a business: How the pandemic changed the rulebook

2021 was about readjusting to the new normal. With the rollout of mass vaccinations and people starting to learn to live with the virus, economies reeled back to normalcy and social life reopened. However, the last two years fundamentally changed how people worked, interacted, and shopped. There was transformational change across industries, especially consumer behavior, which has irreversibly been impacted. As the pandemic pushed everyone to move a large part of their lives online, digital communications govern everything, smartphones have become the primary devices for shopping, booking, transactions and content consumption, and ecommerce sales has taken center stage.

Social distancing and intermittent lockdowns, logistical restrictions across multiple states have made large format stores like shopping malls unattractive, as consumers have drawn towards hyper-localized and personalized shopping experiences that are provided by independent brands – creating exclusivity and ‘digital’ experiential shopping. Meanwhile, for business operations, rapid digital transformation was the only way for business continuity, and it continues to be the order of the day. For businesses to thrive, they had to be ready to adapt and adopt quickly. For example, while many brands did focus on a unified experience across all their channels (even before the pandemic) – with majority of online shopping happening through mobile phones – most brands have now tilted their focus towards providing an omnichannel experience to their consumers.

On the other hand, rapid digital transformation has also accelerated discovery and choice. From virtual relationships to automated chatbots, customers are becoming aware about their interactions though a ‘digital-first’ lens, and are expecting personalized, intuitive and omnichannel engagements. While entrepreneurs continue to invest heavily in tools and technologies to help their brands understand and deliver the right kind of customer experience, they should rather focus on addressing customer experience as a cultural concept within their company. From Amazon to Dominos, companies that have thrived during and in this post-pandemic era are the ones that have strived to create memories with their customers. And to create lasting memories for customers, customer experience must become the job of everyone in the organization – infusing the ‘customer-first’ mentality in the culture.

Today, a typical customer journey will involve multiple departments, which will have to work in tandem – it’s not just sales that’s doing the selling or just the Chief Marketing Officer in-charge of marketing anymore. Brands need to pivot and look beyond – to integrate customer deeper into the way business is done. For example, there are instances of Global Chief Customer Officers, who will be responsible for a new customer experience team that will oversee operations, data analytics, digital customer engagement, restaurant development, marketing, and restaurant solutions. For some companies, they are also in charge of managing its marketing and merchandising operations and direct its omnichannel experience for in-store, mobile and online shoppers.

Apart from customer experience, the pandemic brought to focus the criticality of business resilience, not just for business recovery at the moment but also dealing with future disruptions. This resilience is dependent on how organizations adopt reliable, flexible, and sustainable supply chain models. As

organizations look ahead and learn from the lessons of Covid-19 in 2020-21, they will have to ready themselves with tactical scenario planning, secure essential resources, mitigate operational and program risk. Entrepreneurs will have to accelerate supplier management and refresh their business continuity plans. And finally, to prepare for future shocks, they will have to embed resilience through strategic supply chain mapping and digitizing the entire supply chain management process.

More interestingly, many entrepreneurs and startups had to go back to the drawing board when the pandemic hit. With revenue dropping massively across sectors, they had to look at new business segments. For example, the popular food delivery aggregators had to rethink its business operations during the pandemic. With nobody ordering food during the lockdowns, it doubled down on starting its essential goods/ grocery delivery services, using its own delivery fleet which was, at that moment, idle. To overcome the challenges presented by the pandemic, entrepreneurs should adopt a new mindset. They should accept that this is the new normal by forgetting ‘what was’ or recreating the past business models. Sine there is no going back, organizations should think of solutions that diversify revenue not only for business continuity, but scalability as well.

Also, the adoption of hybrid work culture has brought together best of both worlds, resulting in better work culture, stronger work relationships, focus on mental health and streamlining of operations – and technology integration has acted as an enabler. Our world is no longer about options, rather choices. It’s not about whether we work from home or from the office; having client meetings face to face or via video calls - it’s about the next stage of choices, which means creating more for business to be conducted from the office, as well as home, as well as from the hills and from the road – using reliable, streamlined mobile technology that allows working from location to location without a glitch.

It’s been an unpredictable time for employees and entrepreneurs alike. And both deserve a lot of credit for their agility to adapt in a rapidly changing business environment. However, to remain competitive, organizations need to pool into new technology to not only improve communication or collaboration but into tools for flexibility, productivity and better experiences - both for the employees and customers alike.

Madhav Sheth is the CEO of realme India and Vice-President, President of realme International Business Group.