Sujoy Mitra, Head, Business Technology, Praxis Home Retail, which owns Hometown retail business, shared that with increasing online focus of retail businesses, data analytics and augmented reality will be crucial to deliver customer experience.
What is your agenda for growth in 2021?
Our primary focus for 2021 will be to strengthen our online capability as well as to build platform which is user-friendly and makes information simple. From a business stand point, we are an end-to-end home solutions provider and the idea is to leverage our solutions expertise along with technology to drive our business.
How has the year 2020 increased focus on technology across your industry?
The year 2020 saw a huge shift towards online sales, which happened across all the consumer-facing industries. In fact, non-essential retail businesses were impacted badly in the initial days of the pandemic. Many retailers, who were present online but were more focused on offline, had to move their focus to online due to the pandemic.
What are the scenarios that are likely to impact your industry in 2021?
The pandemic is quite unpredictable. While the things have improved from a business standpoint but the unpredictability of the pandemic is going to mandate a lot of flexibility among all the players. Secondly, we expect to witness a key change where there will be a lot of focus on the domestic procurement, more than imports. Couple of large players in the industry have already embarked on it. Our growth has also been fairly strong from a domestic standpoint and that’s going to increase over the next 12 months.
How do you want to leverage on technology to make processes simpler and efficient?
When we say that the overall industry has moved from offline to online, the one key thing that stands out will be data. So the focus will be on how fungible that data can be and how can you use that same data and feed it into multiple channels.
Further, there will be a lot of focus on easing out the customer buying process. The focus is to make the customer journey on our portal as smooth as possible, which includes remembering the customer details, recent purchases and suggestions for new purchases.
What are the key technologies which you would focus upon in 2021 and beyond?
A lot will come down to data fungibility, which will be crucial with tasks including data clean-up, putting together data, and building data dictionaries. In addition, augmented reality (AR) is going to be big for retailers like us. Further, analytics will become more important with the increasing amount of data coming from online platform. So the need is to analyse the large data sets thought customized models and fairly strong data management systems.
