What are the Strategies and Technologies leading Industry veterans suggest for the “New Normal”

With the future being unpredictable, things aren’t happening normally now, or we can now call this the “New Normal”. But we were not at all prepared for all these sudden changes. Yet we are working to maintain our businesses in our respective industries. Here we have discussed some of the great ideas and tips by leading veterans from AV and IT industries based on our recent webinar .

COVID is Impacting AV industries:

Change is the New Normal!

Practically, the industry is getting affected due to Covid19 in many different forms. This lockdown will bring a lot of changes to say its behavioural, technical, or another basis. The demands for anything then essentials are becoming 2nd priority this is resulting in degrowth of AV sales. The difficulties in maintaining the billings during WFH affect the cash flow of the company. Apart from this, a lot of problems were discussed besides the positive tactics and opportunities to encourage during this period.

Changes due to COVID-19-

The very initial and basic change during this circumstance is online meetings.

1) Video Conferencing –

Video conferencing is being used largely with a concurrent session every minute with multiples times of growth for Zoom, WebEx, or Microsoft teams.

2) Interaction with consumers or customers –

The interaction with your customer will be different from before. People will adopt this new normal which will make us more agile in terms of digitizing the role where possible in turn will get more agile business. Virtual meeting results in less need of traveling making deals and responses faster the essential requirements seem emerging is maintaining business communication irrespective of your workplace.

3) Cyber Attack –

Yet working from home has given a very positive result still there are many things needs to be taken into consideration to keep your WFH safer side. You should limit the use of social media, shopping sites and other random sites from the same working PC to avoid the fishing attack. IT should provide powerful VPN, encrypted sharing, and good antivirus for document safety.

INDIVIDUAL VIEWS OF THE PANELISTS 

• “Workplace will soon shift from video conference to cloud-based solution,”said Vibhor Khanna, Country Manager- Bose corporation.

This shift will eventually cut down the physical infrastructure cost. During or even post lockdown keeping a social distancing will be advised, hence, to schedule proper virtual meetings and communication arrangements boardroom or conference rooms must have a proper setup. An active LED display, the system setup with microphone placement that pickup equally throughout the room beside a camera to capture the whole room so people can keep a distance while meeting without any hustle.

• “Innovation is the “New Normal”, we as an AV industry need to do it”- Kaushik Mukhopadhyay, MD & CEO at AVID.

AR, VR, or IOT going to boom soon in the coming future. This is because it needs less human interaction and proves to be more accurate, efficient with advanced data analysis. Many places robots are placed in working scenario it is obvious the COVID cannot infect them, it has been used to interact with infected patients go closer to them, provide them with medicines, etc. Another glimpse is drones that are been used at many places to provide essentials and services also capturing and recognizing faces through IR sensors to immediate notice for police without being in respective places. All these will be required AI, Machine Learning which has a predominant forecast.

Hence this is not the end, there will occur a loss in entertainment, travel, and tourism market which is a large AV industry market. Yet, if one goes there will be new opportunities coming. Industries like telemedicine where doctor consultancy is done from home, Ed-tech which can bring up AV setups in educational sites and surveillance are the opportunities we should look into.

In coming future Digital Signage will be at a completely new level. Not only at an enterprise level but it will reach up to your devices like phone, tablet, etc. providing a more personalized experience.

• “We need to evolve our business model to navigate through this situation” –  Aditya Todi, Senior Director at Harman International.

People will be very mindful of spending they will think many more times before they spend on something. Hence, we need to be robust to develop something new, evolve new strategies in our business to convince the audience, and to take purchase action for our product. Just like Voice over touch will get into demands for the long run for the market, also the trend of gesture interaction with machines will lead up in the future. In this lockdown people are trying their creativity this will boom in content creations and develop a unique for Business development and engaging your customers.

Can India compete with China’s Interactive Market?

We as AV industry fall under Electronic Sector Design and Manufacturing. Manufacturing of mobile handsets, LCDs, LED TVs, LED products are gone up since 2014 from 87 lacs unit to 1.64cr in 2017 due to the schemes under the national policy of electronics. Though India is the large enough market, the level playing field needs to be created for us to be more competitive in the manufacturing terms.

• Will the he government sector spend more to revive the growth? Kelvin Ashby-King, Managing Director at T2 Consulting said that “It depends on where the money has to be devoted to”.

The government will go short of money and will spend more on labour and agriculture industry. So, we need to push hard on government projects. Yet, the eastern Gov. said will be providing subsidies to maintain and keep people in work and they are sporting and showing that new business economy can be started. We can manufacture considering the local consumption where we started with.

• “Retail and Hospitality will depend on the customer behaviour and Digital Signage will help them to understand that and provide more customer-centric experiences” – Rajeev Krishnaswamy, Infobahn Technical Solution.

Retail companies will have to start implementing a lot of digital experiences in-store as well as online. They will have to start blending in physical and digitals experiences for their customers. We can call it a physical experiences – eg typically riding on digital signage would be an endless eye, magic mirrors, it could be a lot of mobility tools to kind of use in-store mobile apps to study a product feature then to handle products at the store, a lot of shopping aids in terms of shopping apps and all of those would be a need of the hour.

As predicting online retailers will have a lot of competition online – retail will start facing a lot of competition from native online stores. These companies will have to start investing in Omni channels communication to engage with their customers. That is to start looking at websites, online platforms, social media, mobile apps even offline channels like in-store promos print media in whatever ways you can engage the customers remotely needs to be done.

Probably be a queue for assessment we as IT and AV integrators should look at Omni channels to start selling our products. Having said that we as AV and IT channels and technology providers have a good opportunity for us to enable our retail customers to incorporate all these new technologies.

• “Policy changes will bring up behaviour changes post lockdown” –  Bharath Kumar A., Kramer Electronics.

There will various policies and initiatives that will be going to introduced by the government depending upon the scenario as this pandemic will be in a long run, every policy will affect people behaviour and way of thinking. Customers coming for shopping will have a different perspective considering the things they would never do before this pandemic. Rather than only looking into price customers will start looking at the cleanliness of shops, the size of the shop to maintain social distancing. So small size shops or rooms will probably shut or needs to be redesigned, customers will mostly prefer larger shops yet for them to the occupancy planning will be the biggest challenge.

Other important points were discussed in the webinar! In case you missed it, you can watch our live anytime on YouTube