What Experience Has Taught Us
- Employees succeed when the training focuses on their specific customer personas, products, and environment. To create relevance, we shoot video on location, create store layouts, and craft realistic scenarios that require the same decision-making skills they will need on the job.
- The goals of training in retail often include more than skills development. In this industry, our clients are also looking to sell the employee by reinforcing brand messaging and building employee affiliation with the company. They want to create advocates.
- Leadership in retail, more so than other industries, is developed in employees that have frontline customer experience. These employees need help transitioning to first-time management roles and their training can provide a bridge.
- Most retail environments do not support formal classroom learning or lengthy periods of dedicated time for training. The LX journey for retail learners must have maximum flexibility and integrate well with real-world needs and potential disruptions.
Featured Work
AllenComm has worked with many iconic brands in the retail space, creating game-changing programs for everything from onboarding to sales training to safety and compliance. We’re proud of what we’ve learned and accomplished throughout these partnerships. Here are just a few examples from our extensive portfolio of retail clients.
Design and Developing Retail Learner Experiences
Our training programs for the retail industry are designed to meet learners’ needs and align with organizational goals, from mastering inventory management to enhancing customer service skills and developing leadership capabilities. We design learning solutions to meet the unique challenges faced by retail organizations, including scale, time, and space constraints, and can help you overcome these obstacles for greater success.
Retail Industry Needs
As the competitive landscape of retail continues to evolve, it is critical that companies are equipped and empowered to adapt to market trends and customer preferences—and that starts with the workers on the ground.
Organizational Needs
- Career paths to engage employees, increase retention, and build future managers
- Customer service and intrapersonal skills beyond what employees may bring from their life experience
- Tech savvy to create omnichannel customer experiences that combine in-store and online shopping require
- Increased understanding of supply chain and logistics to create seamless customer experiences
Learning Needs
- Retail LX journeys that scaffold learner from onboarding through to management
- Upskilling with realistic customer scenarios and outcomes that simulates customer engagement
- Self-diagnostics and adaptive skills training to fill gaps in technical understanding
- Training on business acumen so that employees are equipped with a conceptual understanding of how the business runs and can better perform their role
Industry-Specific Solutions
Effective and empowering support for frontline retail workers, managers, and salespeople starts with thoughtful program design. The custom solutions we’ve created for our retail clients are built from the ground up, starting with the needs of the learning audience and the ultimate goals of the organization. Finding “the right fit” can make a major impact in an industry where turnover is so prevalent.
Learning Solutions
- Mobile nano-tutorials, each of which can be completed in minutes during downtime on the retail floor
- Gamification of customer service with scoring of speed, accuracy, customer empathy, etc.
- App or systems practice to teach timekeeping, shift planning, inventory, and more
- Product knowledge training on the features and benefits of products for more consultative client interactions
Measurable Outcomes
- Increase in sales performance, as much as 30 percent more than control groups, with a decrease in overall training time
- Higher customer satisfaction and NPS that correlates to retail learning deployment
- Increased productivity, including fewer canceled shifts, and decreased error rates and customer escalations
- Increased time in store and sales per customer correlated to increased product expertise
Sales Enablement Training in the Internet Age
With online sales booming and customer reviews on the web taking on increasing importance in buying decisions, sales enablement training has taken on new dimensions. This article discusses some innovative ways to adapt sales enablement training to address the new realities of the retail industry.
