Vinod Kumar is the Head of Business Insights for Salesforce Commerce Cloud. As an early member of the Demandware team, the fastest-growing enterprise e-commerce platform that was acquired by Salesforce in 2016 to become Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Kumar has had courtside seats to the evolution of ecommerce. He led the roll-out of industry-first E-commerce Benchmarking that enabled Commerce Cloud customers to compare their business performance with an anonymized peer group of sites. His responsibilities include leveraging data science to distill actionable insights from anonymized shopping behavior gleaned from almost a billion online shoppers. He is an occasional blogger and frequent keynote speaker at industry conferences.
When not pouring through digital commerce data, Kumar can be found pouring cappuccino in his local coffee shop that he owns and manages along with his wife in the town of Stoneham, Mass. So by day, he is a digital commerce scientist, technologist, and futurist, guiding some of the biggest global brands on the Salesforce customer success platform, and by weekends he is working alongside his wife to own and operate a small business during a major crisis. I asked Kumar to share his advice with other businesses owners during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Crises, at any level, are disruptive. During times of intense disruption, like the COVID-19 pandemic that we are experiencing, two things are important: 1. Navigating the immediate risks posed by the crisis intelligently, to emerge with minimal damage; 2. Preparing for a post-crisis world that might look distinctly different from the world we live in today.
Every crisis is also an opportunity to earn the trust and credibility of our customers, partners, community, and family (not necessarily in that order) by helping them deal with the crisis.
Businesses large and small are showing their resiliency and their commitment to seeing this crisis through, in the right way. Patagonia, the OG of conscious commerce, announced that they will be closing their physical and online stores in an abundance of caution to help stem the spread of the virus. During the announcement, the closure was for a duration of two weeks and all employees continue to get paid during the time. In an effort to help small businesses, Square announced that they will be refunding all software subscription fees for the month of March.
In times like these, uncertainty and a vacuum of accurate information causes as much anxiety as the crisis itself. To counter that, Salesforce and Tableau launched an online data and visualization resource hub on the coronavirus and public response. Salesforce also launched a Care Response Solution to help healthcare systems deal with the huge influx of requests due to the pandemic, in addition to making their collaboration platform – Quip – free for any customers and nonprofits to help with the teleworking mandates being issued. This is especially relevant if you are a small business that’s traditionally operated from a physical office that suddenly has to switch to teleworking.
Individuals are stepping in as well. Reddit co-founder, Alexis Ohanian bought a billboard in Times Square urging people to help #FlattenTheCurve by staying home.
As a small business owner himself, Kumar sees small businesses in his community react and respond in their own way. Kumar has assembled a list of suggestions that businesses should follow to navigate these unchartered waters. These are immediately actionable and not time intensive.
And, as active contributing members of your respective communities, please consider shopping small and local during this time of crisis, while prioritizing your safety and well-being.
In a future article, Kumar and I will share our point of view about how small businesses can proactively invest in technologies like an e-commerce platform, mobile applications, social collaboration documents, and community and social platforms to better position themselves for growth and new business models.
This article was co-authored by Vinod Kumar, head of Business Insights for Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
