We’re just beginning to understand the health and economic impact of COVID-19. India is already in an unprecedented lockdown for 21 days forcing most of the retail and restaurant businesses to a close. The outbreak of COVID-19 and this lockdown will deeply impact the retail and restaurant sectors especially owners, employees, delivery staff, farmers, operators and just about everyone in the retail and food business. After this slowdown, Intuition Systems expects the business will improve, and customers will come. So, hang in there. We have a few suggestions and advice for you to help navigate these challenging times.

In this difficult time, first, take care of yourself, your family and your employees. Use the best hygienic practices to avoid contact with the virus as advised by the health agencies. Use masks, avoid close contact, maintain at least 1 to 3 meters distance, wash your hands regularly with soap, sanitize frequently your workplace and objects. Soap kills the virus. You can get much of this information from the World Health Organization (WHO), Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) and other agencies. Intuition Systems also has launched a free app and website called COVID monitoring (Covidmonitoring.in) that can help self-monitoring by employees or any individual for early COVID 19 symptoms and can provide alerts and reports, thus informing, monitoring and keeping yourself or employees safe through Corona pandemic. You or your employees can download COVID monitoring in the play store. You can download this app for free. If you are a large organization, you can email us at contact@intuitionsoftwares.com and we can set up this COVID monitoring dashboard for your HR manager to manage remotely and track any COVID occurrences of your employees to keep the workplace and employees safe and make an informed decision.

Although the business is slow or had come to a halt, you can do other things and prepare yourself for when the lockdown is over and things get better, which it will. During this down-time, you can think about how to improve your business. You can learn about what new technology or non-technology add-ons or features needed to make it function better than ever and efficiently. Learn about IVEPOS features that can increase your revenues and help operate the business efficiently.

Keep in touch with your customer:

Keep in touch with your customers. Send emails, SMS, loyalty, and rewards. Do you know that IVEPOS Reports have a feature that can show you who are the top customers are? You can email or SMS them, update them on the current situation and award loyalty discounts or rewards that they can avail when the lockdown ends or through online ordering. The cloud-based IVEPOS Reports can be accessed from IVEPOS POS or IVEPOS Dashboard app from anywhere. Reports have many more features and powered by AI analytics. You can see top selling products, top customers, prediction for future sales, customer reports, discount reports, categories of sale whether it is a card, cash or wallets, and many more features. Talking about IVEPOS Dashboard, let’s say you are stuck in Singapore during this lockdown, you can monitor sales of all your stores whether it is in san Francisco or Delhi from your hotel. The dashboard also has all the necessary sales reports that you can be used to monitor stock transfer from warehouses to individual store branches. Learning these features will come handy especially when you are traveling or have a multi-city or multi-counter business or an online cloud kitchen.

Take advantage of this shut down to work on the areas of your business that you wouldn’t normally have the time to focus on. Upgrade your business management tools such as POS, reporting, stock management, customer loyalty, accounting. You can learn new features.

For example, the waste problem is a big deal in running a restaurant. IVEPOS has a feature called wastage calculator. Let say we need 0.1 kg of chicken needed for biriyani and we have 10 kgs of chicken. This should be enough for 100 biriyanis, but you have only 6kgs remaining after selling 10 biriyanis there is a 20% wastage. Now you need to find out what happened to this 2 kgs chicken, is it wasted or stolen?

Similarly, there is a cost estimator feature that can help you to automatically calculate the cost of making a product for example how much it takes to make one biriyani. This will allow you to price your product accordingly. This is a very useful tool as many retailers and restaurants can lose money unnecessarily underpricing the product, so with this price estimator tool, this can be avoided.

Another aspect that is worth learning is Contactless payments. If you are up and running your business, you can use contactless payments such as NFC. Currently, the digitized physical cards such as Samsung pay and wallets such as google pay or Paytm is popular. This is the best way to getting paid for services and avoiding any contact with customers during this COVID 19 crisis. Also, if you don’t have this setup it is a good time to learn and update to accept digital contactless pay. Another important area that is catching up is digital cards, so you can use this downtime to familiarize yourself with the new type of payments.

These are difficult times, but this will also pass eventually. Together we can support each other and sail through this. And when normalcy returns, you will be prepared to face the world with your new habits that you acquired during this lock-down time to build an even better, efficient, profitable business.