Facing the current upstream economic situation, businesses need to have the techniques to adapt quickly, which could be either a paradigm shift or simply taking advantage of the potentials that were previously missed.
Here are 4 suggestions from Haravan to retailers to proactively "help” their businesses during the pandemic.
Even in the time of isolation, customers still need and want to shop, and doing so online is their only option. Thanks to its convenience, availability, and safeness, even the fastidious customers have learned and started the online shopping habit.
Therefore, even after the epidemic is over, retailers should not and cannot rely solely on a single selling channel which is an offline store. Shifting to online is a must-try if business owners want to reach customers, and COVID-19 only made this process happen faster. Some of the sales channels that should not be missed are websites, Facebook, Google, and e-commerce marketplaces where millions of people shop every day. With the current technological solutions, model shifting and the parallel operation of online-offline channels have become significantly easy.
20% of old customers can contribute 80% profit to a company if they are cared for properly. During the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, instead of trying to run ads to find new customers, business owners can focus on looking after the people who have bought their goods.
Sending an interesting Messenger message to the old customers is a useful way to reconnect with them. The chances of a returning customer buying a product are many times higher than trying to sell the item to a new customer, and the cost is much cheaper.
A solution to store guests' information and deliver accurate messages to each customer is required to increase the business’s efficiency.
Optimizing the operation system to save manpower and costs is even more important in times of market fluctuations. From precise order processing to the management of delivery, inventory, customer, promotion, sales, etc., a strong controlling system is needed. This is when the whole department must try to sell together to keep the business running.
Consulting processes and online sales policies are needed to ensure the closing rate, the rate of successful delivery, etc., minimizing the time-consuming operations, such as managing orders in a centralized manner or transferring the orders to the delivery units.
Applying technology to business can help in handling manual jobs that are error-prone and time-consuming, resulting in high-performance operation without too much manpower, as well as immediately reducing the cost pressure for business owners in this difficult time.
Many retailers only focus on expanding their businesses, trying to advertise to sell more, and making more sales without managing the business performance. The reason for this is because the aggregation of data on each sale channel is too complicated and time-consuming, so they only try to sell a lot and believe that sooner or later it will generate "profit". In fact, many business owners have lost money because they overlooked management.
They have no clue of how much profit their investment brings, if there is anything wrong with their revenue, how to manage the human resource, orders, and the delivery costs, etc. resulting in poor business performance. Retailers need a platform to synchronously manage businesses across multiple channels, putting everything into a system to look up accurately in real-time and immediately identify which sales channels are effective, which products are popular, what the revenues are, which teams have high performance, as well as to grasp the points that need to be overcome immediately to cope with unexpected events during and after the pandemic.
>> 8 business pieces of advice from successful businessmen
Source: https://hocvien.haravan.com/
