Retail Operations
3 February 2021
A week in the life of a store sees new product lines being introduced, in-store promotions, product recalls and staff onboarding – making retail undoubtedly a fast-paced industry. To only add to the commotion, 2021 brings new challenges, additional procedures, more stringent health and safety measures and smaller teams in store.
There’s a lot of information your team need to know and they must be kept up to date. They need to be trained on a diverse set of topics, from customer service and policy and procedures, to brand awareness and product knowledge.
For the time being face to face training is on hold. So it’s not surprising, as we enter a new year, many retailers are re-evaluating their current training processes and looking for new technology to support the complex training needs of 2021.
With so many LMS systems, authoring tools and microlearning apps out there, it can be hard to know where to focus your efforts. That’s why we’ve pulled together the key learning practices that you should take into 2021.
The average attention span of a person is around 10-20 minutes. That does not leave much time to share the wealth of knowledge needed to operate in a store estate.
For everyone to maximise their learning experience, courses need to be flexible and fun to make the most of those precious few minutes.
A learning platform that’s jam packed with features to engage the widest audience should accommodate all types of learning styles, whether visual, auditory, written or sensory. Not to mention, presenting a topic in multiple ways will give you more chances to connect with more people.
Your mobile learning platform should support interactive content that include videos, gifs, images and quizzes to make learning fun. As well as encouraging team members to continue to return to the platform and learn new skills.
Flexibility isn’t just important for the user, it’s also crucial for the people creating your content. Whatever platform you choose must be user friendly, intuitive and provide great support, so all your team’s focus can be on creating courses that achieve results.
There’s a lot to contend with on a normal day in retail, and teams often don’t have the time to sit down and complete a long training course. They need courses that support short microlearning courses. That way, even if they only have 5 quiet minutes, they can achieve something productive.
Content that’s too long not only runs the risk of making your audience lose interest, but it’ll also make them less likely to return to your platform, and that will have a terrible knock-on effect to your training programme.
Nobody knows the intricacies of your store estate like your teams on the ground. Long-standing employees have a wealth of knowledge that is sometimes difficult to share horizontally across your estate.
Collective knowledge of your retail organisation is most productive when it’s actively shared and encouraged to be shared.
Enabling social learning features within your platform can support your teams in fostering a strong learning culture within your organisation. With the right system employees can be made to feel safe, ask questions and talk about their ideas, without feeling as if they might say the wrong thing or ask a silly question.
In a fast-paced environment like retail, you need to make learning materials accessible and effective at a time and place convenient to the learner.
Your teams need to access training courses anytime, anywhere. Whether you’re a manager on the shop floor, an Area Manager in the field or a remote worker from Head Office.
The training platform needs to work across all devices, operating systems and modern browsers, and it should always be designed mobile-first.
In the past you might have conducted a half day of training in the back office or a conference room, but this is not an engaging way to learn and it takes a lot of time, costs and resources to organise, not to mention a cost incurred for the trainer, event space and travel.
Nobody wants to be confronted with pages and pages of training courses, when only a small number are applicable to their job. Being able to assign courses to job roles, means it’s easy to see what courses need to be completed and by who. That way, everyone who logs into the mobile learning platform can easily see what they’ve achieved so far and what is still left to do.
Having a flexible and functional mobile learning platform doesn’t need to be limited to teams in store – it can be used across your business, from district managers and sales reps, to head office teams. Your employees are the key to maximising sales. You need to arm your workforce with the mobile learning tools they need to succeed.
In November 2020, StorIQ launched a modern, intuitive e-learning platform that will revolutionise the way you educate and engage your team.
Whether you’re onboarding new employees or want to develop the skills of your existing team, the flexible format means you can create highly visual, engaging courses and quizzes to be completed anytime, anywhere.
All the course data integrates into StorIQ, so you can track and manage training data alongside StorIQ’s powerful operations metrics.
For more information on how the StorIQ Academy can support your mobile learning strategy for 2021 get in touch with a member of the team by emailing marketing.team@storiq.net.
