More of It and Faster

We were headed in that direction anyway….the pandemic just accelerated the trip.

That’s the general assessment of CEOs whose companies serve in the retail and consumer worlds globally. The international accounting and consulting firm KPMG sampled opinions among international retail leaders to get a feeling for how they were preparing to emerge from the COVID pandemic and what the new ‘normal’ might look like.

What they found is that most of these business leaders feel the pandemic was an accelerator – it increased the velocity of change that was already underway. The move to more on-line or e-commerce was happening but the pandemic brought the transition quicker.

As a result, three-quarters say they will be investing in more on-line capacity and a comparable number plan to sharpen their customer-centric skills with technology such as chat bots as they expect more and more of their interaction with consumers will come via electronic platforms.

Where the issues do lie, however is upstream – in supply chains. The pandemic interrupted the flow of goods from factories to stores and fixing that problem is now Job #1 for nearly half of those surveyed.