A new multi-pronged strategy to help small and medium-sized enterprises to manage the difficult economic environment and adapt to new digital-first customer behaviour was recently announced by Google India. Building on its efforts to support customers discover small businesses through Google search and maps, the new project, in collaboration with Zoho and Instamojo, will concentrate on accelerating efforts to help businesses create a digital presence.
Google has also associated with Dunzo and Swiggy to rapidly control its on-boarding process, keeping in mind the needs of various companies, with both partners dedicated to providing additional resources to small businesses to start taking online orders and facilitate delivery logistics.
The new proposal focuses on the “Grow with Google Small Business hub” initiative and it is in specific response to the feedback obtained in the Google-Kantar small company tracker study held in July from small-medium businesses. Customer-related difficulties top the list for small businesses, as per the survey, with 92 percent of businesses facing customer-related challenges, sales loss due to low demand and fixed cost payments are the other most significant challenges among companies. The study also shows that companies are seeing the advantages of going digital, and today, 5 out of 10 companies are using digital platforms to serve their customers, compared to only 4 out of 10 in April.
“Today, the need to go digital is a requirement and SMBs are difficult to digitise quickly,” said Shalini Girish, Customer Solutions Director at Google India, speaking about the new initiative. In the current crisis, we need to do everything we can to keep millions of small businesses on their path of digital transformation and to help business revival. Small business needs vary around the nation, and we collaborate with market leaders to provide more resources to help small businesses migrate digital.
However, the most critical need is on the customer demand side, and to help us launch a national ‘Make Small strong’ campaign #makesmallstrong to rally citizens’ support to help small businesses by shopping locally, leaving feedback and ratings and endorsing their favourite social media retailers to help build demand for these businesses. We are grateful to our partners for teaming up with us and sincerely hope that together we could be able to improve the rise of small businesses and to resolve the problems in a significant way.
