Photo by Phix Nguyen on Unsplash
The most critical piece of the global village is the information exchange. In the last few decades, it has moved from wired telephones to wireless and then today runs on top of an interconnected network of computers called the internet.
The exchange of information during pre-COVID-19 was a combination of contact and contactless. In contact information exchange one-to-one communication was the key to working and developing things for good. However, post-COVID-19 the new normal will be contactless, which is getting adopted much faster than expected.
Contactless Information Exchange (CIE) will find its way into many aspects of life rather than just technology-enabled solutions. CIE is going to make humans far more technology-dependent than they are now. Whether it is driving the car, paying for bills, restaurant outings, etc., every day to day activity is going to see CIE incorporated by default.
PAYMENT
Contactless payments are the first major shift that post-COVID-19 is going to bring. Even today in North American alone 50% of the transaction are non-cash mode.
More and more people are using contactless payment with around 51% of the U.S. payment transactions were contactless mode in the last 6 months. The trend is only going to go up. In Europe, the contactless payment has seen a 97% increase in the last two years, and over the next one year, it is being predicted that almost 100% of the credit and debit card transactions in Europe are going to be contactless.
There are major benefits of contactless that includes paying without touching different devices. A traditional process of using credit or debit cards at the store often requires handing over the card to the shop owner and then he/she using it on the point of sale (PoS) system. All this process is not pandemic friendly and going on in the future, PoS will be history.
Change in mode of payment will also dramatically change the equipment business that serves the payment industry. PoS will make the way of wireless technologies like MIFARE, which can securely allow the exchange of information for a service.
Even smartphones using Square Reader will start coming up with inbuilt systems that will allow contactless payment options. This is going to drastically reduce the cost of accepting payment for small merchants who often end up paying not only for the PoS portable device but also the percentage of the payment received.
Questions are being raised about security around contactless payments, however, it has been proved again and again that contactless payments are much more secure than traditional contact-based transactions.
SHOPPING
Amazon has already shown the world how the future of shopping is going to be contactless by introducing Amazon Go experience. Even though the majority of the shopping during COVID-19 has moved to eCommerce, the traditional way of shopping is going to stay. People would always be willing to go out spend quality time with family and still will be willing to experience the joy of buying in-store.
What is certainly going to change is that more and more big stores like Walmart etc., are going to ramp up their back end that will not only cater to those shopping in the store but to also ordering online. All of this will be geared towards being contactless.
IKEA already has shown how one can take advantage of the big store experience by not only catering to the in-store experience that includes dining but also ensuring how the warehouse can be connected to the back end allowing the online experience to be as good in the store.
Many of the stores are already providing home delivery of goods, but that experience will still take time to scale at large. Part of the reason is being comfortable with someone else coming in contact with your groceries in the post-COVID-19 world. Even though the majority of the delivery services are COVID-19 complaint. With Postmates getting acquired by Uber, the future for door-to-door delivery looks promising.
In India, Reliance Industries homegrown JioMart has already started connecting the small shops with consumers. This is going to shake up the whole industry with families preferring doorstep deliveries that option to go out.
Post-COVID-19 future of shopping is not only going to be contactless but the whole experience is going to change.
TRANSPORTATION
Moving of goods from one point to another has traditionally involved using trucks for smaller distances. Within cities and towns, much smaller systems are being deployed. Post COVID-19 is going to see the increasing deployment of driverless delivery carts that will reduce the number of contacts for a shipped well drastically.
In 2017, self-driving trucks were deployed for testing. In 2020, they are ready to take the industry. The approach self-driving trucks are going to bring is ensuring that the goods are picked from the source location and delivered to the destination without stops and that is going to ensure that the goods are safe and went through the contactless process.
Consumer Brands has already formed a task force to ensure that the future moves to contactless delivery as soon as possible.
DINING
Outings are part of life, no one feels being at work and home all the time. The restaurant industry took the biggest hit during COVID-19 with the majority of jobs being lost in this sector. COVID-19 has increasingly prompted the need to ensure that the dining experience also changes in the future.
Food is a product that does require lots of contacts and it is not possible to make dinning a 100% contactless experience. To ensure that the orders are placed and ready for dining, the future is going to be a move towards pre-orders where the food is ordered before the consumer leaves the house and by the time he/she reaches the food is ready to eat.
Another approach that is going to involved contactless dining will be placing orders at the restaurants using an application rather than letting servers take the orders.
There are already many solutions out in the market for restaurant business but the major impact is going to be the additional cost that restaurant owners will eventually have to pass to consumers to survive in a competitive industry.
HEALTHCARE
COVID-19 was all about health and well being. There is going to be an increasing need to monitor the health and ensure that the individuals are free of diseases that might turn into a pandemic.
The Healthcare industry requires the diagnosis of patients and doing it without being in contact is difficult. What the healthcare industry can do is to eliminate the pre and post patient examination process more contactless.
It is going to involve screening using tools that can detect and advise physicians of steps in advance. Remote sensing is going to be another solution that will be deployed at a larges scale not only in hospitals but in places with more crowd.
Remote monitoring of patients post-diagnosis is going to be the default way of working in the health care industry. It will eliminate the number of contacts that patients have with others.
Telehealth is going to be the first point of consultations for non-life-threatening diseases. It is going to also enable many technological solutions like Cross Reality
Contactless Information Exchange is going to be the future of communication and is going to be the new normal. It will be interesting to see how new solutions are built around the existing technology to provide contactless services.
Contactless might open up whole new industry and possibilities.
McKinsey&Company has a very informative take on how operations around contactless will evolve in future.
