Innovating in Times of Crisis to Stay on Top
Inflation, financial uncertainty, interest rates hikes, layoffs… For the past few months, the papers have talked about nothing else, it’s enough to give us all nightmares! By now you’re probably biting your fingernails worrying about the impact 2023 and the next few years will have on your company. Maybe you even feel powerless faced with the current uncertain situation, and that’s totally normal given the pessimistic public conversation.
However, Korem wants to provide you with solutions to prevent the unexpected. Investing in geospatial data and technology now could ensure your business resilience and give you an invaluable competitive advantage in the future.
Now Is Not the Time for Caution!
It may seem counterintuitive to keep spending money even in times of economic instability. Many companies have already made changes like cutting budgets and reducing staff in the hope of minimizing the effects of the coming economic slowdown. These solutions are often made in a hurry and are likely to only have a positive impact in the short term.
However, as this well-known quote underlines, crises often provide a unique chance to be creative and to generate business opportunities that weren’t there before. Those who dare to reinvent their processes and redesign the customer experience, specifically by using innovative technologies such as geospatial, will be best placed to adapt to the new reality once the dust settles.
Where Best to Invest to Keep the Momentum Going?
Based on our long experience of working with companies in various sectors, we have identified two main areas where we think it’s best to invest, now more than ever:
Mobility Data
These days, it’s no longer enough to rely solely on base data like demographic data to make business decisions. We now need to supplement it with more granular data, such as foot traffic data and vehicle traffic data.
Mobility data provides historic or near real-time information on customer movements (departure and destination points, speed, and distance), as well as on their dwell times, activities and transactions. Analyzing this data allows you to better understand changes in your target customer’s behavior and add greater context to other data.
This way, it becomes much easier for you to monitor performance, estimate sales, adapt your services and products offer based on demand, and measure your brand awareness.
Watch this webinar on traffic analytics »
Migrating to Cloud-Native Platforms
However, mobility data generally involves processing and integrating large quantities of high velocity changing data. Two options are available to support your digital transformation process and help you take full advantage of these new datasets:
- Migrate your data warehouses to a new generation cloud-native platform to enable advanced big data analytics and greater business agility.
- Use a new form of Data as a Service (DaaS) capable of transforming, modeling, and integrating these datasets into ready-to-use data to address specific business problems.
Furthermore, cloud-native platforms, such as Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, or BigQuery, offer the advantage of being able to store several different data types and formats in one single warehouse. These platforms are a very powerful tool for both Data Scientists and Directors of Information Systems (DSI) who need to get faster results for complex use cases.
Watch this webinar on cloud environments »
Customers Who Took the Plunge
Having just come out of the COVID-19 crisis, companies must now adjust once again to new changes in the economy and customers’ expectations. Information that provides greater context has become not only desirable but essential in decision-making.
We’ve seen that those customers who had the courage to invest in geospatial technologies before or during the pandemic were best placed to deal with problems in the midst of the crisis. They’ve also been able to continue operating efficiently and have been less affected by economic fluctuations.
St-Hubert Group
The St-Hubert restaurant chain is a good example. It decided to migrate its on-premise geolocation solution to a cutting-edge cloud-native solution as part of its digital transformation. This solution was particularly put to the test with the arrival of COVID-19 when the St-Hubert Group had to close all its restaurants to the public.
The company was able to absorb the additional volume of external orders, which increased by 40 to 50%, without any problem. It was also able to improve its match rate for online orders to 96%.
This solution earned Korem the title of New Normal Ninja at the 2022 Channel Innovation Conference and Awards, a prize awarded to the most unique initiative that helped a partner or client manage the impact of the recent pandemic.
Now It’s Your Turn!
We’ve been talking about investing in granular data and migrating to cloud-native computing for a long time. Nevertheless, we are convinced that 2023 is the ideal year to act, even despite—or should I say, especially with—the current global economic uncertainty. Otherwise, cutting corners in terms of data provision and integration could compromise your data integrity, and with it the quality of your decision-making.
By continuing to refine your processes over the next year, you’ll not only free up your employees, so that they can concentrate on value-added tasks, you’ll also be able to continue providing a quality service to your customers. Your customers will appreciate the extra mile, which will certainly distinguish you from your competitors who opted for caution instead.
If you missed the opportunity to reinvent your company during COVID-19, it’s still not too late to do so before the next economic turmoil. Our experts are here to guide you through choosing the right tool to help you do more and position you advantageously for economic recovery in order to maintain the sustainability of your organization!
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