In retail, maintaining a knowledgeable, capable and well-trained workforce is a key factor in success, especially in categories with tight competition. At the same time, it’s a major challenge for most retail businesses.
On the one hand, retail businesses deal with one of the highest industry turnover rates, and on the other, they need to maintain a high quality of service: One out of three customers will leave the brand after a single unfortunate experience, according to research from PWC.
This becomes a complicated dilemma for retail business owners: how can you create a learning environment for frontline staff that can be maintained on a budget and that also effectively drives quick results? Here we discuss the tools and strategies retail businesses can employ to achieve this.
The Challenges to Retail Retention
High turnover rates make employers in retail cautious about investing heavily in their staff’s education and training. Why spend resources on expensive and lengthy upskilling only to see the trained personnel leave and someone else reap the benefits? Even though research proves that employees who receive good in-house training and see ways to advance their career tend to stay longer, high turnover is still an acute problem for retailers.
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At the same time, with a constant influx of new hires among frontline staff, onboarding becomes an ongoing process for most retail companies. New hires need to be trained about products, services, codes of conduct, seasonal promotions, handling reclamations, conflict management and other customer service-related skills. Moreover, this kind of training needs to be conducted across all branches and locations. If the quality of training and service is inconsistent in a retail chain from one store to another, it can cause serious reputational damage.
Pros and Cons to the Traditional Frontline Training Approach
The most straightforward approach to frontline staff training is usually hiring a coach or even a team of coaches, if the scope of work is large. These specialists, trained in instructional design and possessing retail industry knowledge, would then travel between company hubs and branches to train employees. There are several advantages, and drawbacks, to that system.
Advantages include:
- Most people still prefer face-to-face training, according to our research, which is achieved when there’s a mentor;
- The ability to have a lot of peer-to-peer interaction, discussions and feedback during training; and
- The ability to carry out practical sessions together with theory.
Disadvantages include:
- It’s very expensive — an expert’s salary, traveling and event organization costs come with a high fee;
- This method of training is not easily scaled because you need to hire more coaches to scale, which means costs rise in geometrical progression; and
- There’s no way to provide for a consistent level of training, because the quality hangs on individual coaches.
Businesses realize that their frontline staff’s performance and behavior directly affects their success, but traditional training requires a high level of investment. As a result, retail companies try to find a compromise by hiring less expensive (and usually less effective) trainers, cutting down the amount of training or making choices about who to train and what aspects of training to prioritize.
However, this method leads to skill gaps, uneven skill levels and dissatisfaction among staff members who feel frustrated and neglected because of the lack of career opportunity and skill development.
Learning Management Systems: A Cost-Effective Solution
A learning management system (LMS) can address the challenges described above in a number of ways. Essentially, an LMS allows retail businesses to streamline frontline staff training and deliver it at a wider scale, all while maintaining high standards across the board. Here’s how:
1. Digitized knowledge: One absolutely crucial task an LMS can help with is digitizing successful experiences and mentor knowledge. Effective business coaches are no longer the sole carriers of invaluable expertise and knowledge. Once you create a successful course, you can also use it as many times as you want without additional costs.
2. 100% scalability: An LMS can be easily scaled alongside business expansion when you need to train more staff simultaneously. In this case, you won’t have to hire more business coaches or trainers. You will have already digitized your knowledge and produced online courses that you can deliver across all hubs and local branches of your company digitally.
3. Consistency of training quality: When you offer a high-quality course to your employees using an LMS, you have full control of what you are teaching and to whom. This means you offer the same quality of training to all of your employees, regardless of how many of them you need to train at once.
4. Improved onboarding procedures with higher trial period success rates: It’s not a secret that frontline work in retail often entails hiring people with little experience, often young people at the start of their careers. For these workers, a lot depends on how successfully they are onboarded.
A good onboarding process can significantly influence the rate of employees who successfully pass their trial period, thus cutting initial hiring costs. Using an LMS, you can create high-quality, uniform onboarding procedures and make them accessible to all new hires, which significantly reduces the time mentors need to spend training them. Moreover, with an LMS, it is much easier to incorporate trainee feedback and constantly improve your onboarding procedures.
5. Flexible learning formats: The use of an LMS offers your learners unique opportunities to study at their own pace, in the environment of their choice. A good LMS will have features for mobile learning and content delivery and various accessibility features. This makes learning much more comfortable for the employee and doesn’t limit you to the single format of offline workshops and training sessions with coaches.
6. Quick delivery: When you use an LMS, the delivery of learning materials to all of your frontline staff can be very quick. Imagine, for example, that you are going to have a seasonal promo and you need all of your shop assistants to know the rules and understand the script on how to promote it to customers before the promotion begins. Imagine the time and effort needed to organize this kind of training at scale, particularly if all you have is senior staff to act as mentors. With an LMS, you can quickly create a course using the specified Authoring tool and deliver it instantly.
7. Significant cost reduction: With all of the above, you can drive learning for frontline staff at a fraction of the budget that would be spent on arranging training with business coaches. You can maintain predictably high standards of quality and exert control in a clear and traceable way. You also can reduce costs spent on expensive coaches and training venues, and you no longer need to decide who to train. Subsequently, this will help your employees get free access to quality learning and upskilling, which can improve employee retention and the connected HR costs.
Transferring your learning processes from retail staff to an LMS allows you to achieve many things that traditional training methods don’t. We are talking about exponentially improved scalability, better control over quality and a digitized knowledge base that doesn’t depend on business coaches. But most importantly, all of this leads to a significant reduction in the cost of learning.
Michael Keller is an experienced IT professional with a rich background in product development, marketing and sales. Currently, he serves as a Chief Product Officer at iSpring Solutions. His lengthy career at iSpring has been marked by progression through various key roles, providing him with a comprehensive understanding of iSpring products, the wider industry and customer needs. Keller leads the constant development of iSpring’s core products, including iSpring Learn (a learning management system) and iSpring Suite (a robust authoring tool).
