Innovation has increasingly supported the way businesses across the globe operate; however, this phenomenon often increases uncertainty around supply chain disruptions and management. The COVID-19 pandemic clearly reveals the lack of resilience in the supply chain domain, and the business failures show the impact of disruptions may have on a global network scale as individual supply chain connections and nodes fail. This cascading failure also has an impact on service quality dimensions of a business. Service quality advances have profoundly changed the way service organizations and consumers interact. This impact can be observed across sectors and industries. Service quality has become a popular area of researchers and academic investigation and has become recognized as a key factor in differentiating service products and building competitive advantage. Any shortcoming of a lack in service quality is easily identified and is translated into negative reviews on social media through word-of-mouth and other channels.
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The past decade of global economic integration through business and trade has seen a steady yet blooming march of progression (Kobrin, 2015; Canh, Schinckus and Dinh Thanh, 2021). From traditional brick and mortar structure to e-commerce, from container ships to supercomputers and from human resource to artificial intelligence- all have contributed to a web of businesses and trade so complex and detailed that it has taken roots to mark a new science (Yun et al., 2019; Betz et al., 2019; Bulturbayeyich and Jurayeyich, 2020). Supply chain management and logistics is a vital part of the business process, which, when managed effectively, can result in lowering a company’s overall costs and boost profitability (Doktoralina and Apollo, 2019; Guo, Cheng and Liu, 2020).
The retail sector, in this perspective, has been quite mature in adopting supply chain management and logistics to emerge out as a strategic, competitive, growth-oriented and sustainable domain in business globally (Ketchen and Craighead, 2020). Retail or retailing provides a systematic response of the firms for the increasing uncertainty and complexity for the V-U-C-A environment (Bennis and Nanus 1987); therefore, such intricacy has pushed the adaptation of retail firms for a more holistic approach for the process management. In a recent piece of evidence, supply chains have proved that it isn’t just a research theme for academicians and practitioners. The Covid- 19 pandemic is playing out in brutal ways. On a global level, economies, governments and authorities have failed in providing urgent medical goods and essential items. However, the system of supplying has continued to function remarkably well despite the most challenging times. There has been a new appreciation for the Indian supply chain management and logistics sector, particularly online retail stores such as, ‘e.g., Grofers’, food aggregator, ‘e.g., Swiggy and Zomato’, logistics ‘e.g., India Post and Blue Dart’, energy ‘e.g., BSES’, transportation, ‘e.g., the Delhi transport corporation and Air India’, health care ‘e.g., AIIMS and National Institute of Virology’ and other industries responsible for sustaining life during shutdowns.