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| Retail |
The retail industry occupies the “last mile” of the global business-value chain. It is the final link between the consumer and the product manufacturer. Retailing, therefore, has to act as the interface between a vast array of extremely diverse products and services on the one hand, and the widely variegated and fickle consumers on the other.
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| This entails recruiting, managing and retaining a workforce that has to constantly acquire and upgrade knowledge and skills that have extremely short shelf lives. These requirements, combined with the prevailing shortage of talent and skills, throw up some unique challenges. |
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| The Challenges: |
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Environmental diversity: |
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Retail sales teams are usually spread across multiple geographical locations that, usually, are culturally and linguistically diverse. Each location, moreover, may be governed by different laws. |
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Employees from different linguistic backgrounds: |
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It is easier to learn something new when the medium of instruction is the native tongue or first language of the learner. Therefore, a “one size fits all” solution in a single language would not be effective. |
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Competition: |
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With multiple players chasing the same consumers with similar products, even minor factors that provide the smallest advantage matter. |
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High employee turnover: |
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Retail, as an industry, has always been prone to a high employee turnover. A sizeable percentage, mainly the fresh graduates who are recruited, do not even stay in the retailing field, transitioning through retail jobs as they search for the right career. |
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Low margins: |
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As revenue margins in retailing are very low and salaries account for a large part of the expenditure, training budgets tend to be very low, often 50% to 25% of that of other industries. |
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Wide range of required skills: |
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Retail personnel must learn how to how to price a large variety of products, sell them, handle customer complaints and objections, and much more. |
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Risk control and compliance: |
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Retail personnel must strictly adhere to internal processes and external legislations to protect the brand image of the company and avoid litigations. |
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Rapid pace of change: |
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In most retail businesses, products and technologies change regularly. Therefore, product training, sales training and service training need to be constantly updated in order to keep pace with the competition. |
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Need to increase retention rates: |
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With employee turnover rates as high as 30% to 50%, even a small reduction in turnover has a disproportionately large impact on sales and productivity. Sometimes a reduction of even 2% to 3% translates into sizeable savings in terms of money. In fact, the biggest real business benefit from eLearning can be improved retention. |
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Need for analytics: |
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Retail training must be given to thousands of employees across multiple store locations. This demands a provision for reports from every store and manager to provide important metrics on usage, completion and certification. |
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Proprietary applications and tools: |
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Generally, sales enterprises make use of proprietary applications and tools that require custom training that is tailor-made for their learners. |
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Need for acquired skills to be demonstrated: |
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The learner has to demonstrate the acquired skills to the team leader or manager. This calls for a blended learning approach, combining technology and traditional methods of training. |
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| The Solution: |
eLearning has become an essential tool for managing the skills and talent gap. Every business, regardless of the industry it is in, can benefit greatly from a good eLearning programme. The nature of the retail industry, however, lends itself to disproportionately large returns on investment (RoI) with the use of Technology-Based Training (TBT) or eLearning as a strategic differentiator.
Some of the features of our learning solutions for the retail industry are: |
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Cost-effective and on-demand training programs. |
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Homogenous training in multiple languages to ensure consistency in the sales methods. |
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Self-paced learning solutions in the form of CBT/WBT/ILT. |
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Courses with screenshot-based demonstrations and simulations for custom applications and tools. |
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Virtual scenarios to help learners to identify with the different perspectives of the retail industry and, therefore, to learn better. |
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Soft skills, hard skills, and process-based trainings covering all aspects and functions in the industry. |
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Flexible course content, allowing clients to manage and update the learning solutions according to their needs. |
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Just-in-time training for customer-facing personnel. |
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Audience-focused instructional design strategies. |
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| The Hurix Advantage: |
Retail employees are usually young and from diverse linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. As a result, the environment that they work in is very dynamic. Content, therefore, must be appealing and engaging, and should be delivered in the peer language, that is, the language spoken by the linguistic, cultural and age group that the learner belongs to.
The Hurix Team’s outstanding technical and content-creation skills, combined with a deep understanding of the needs of the industry and the target audience, make it uniquely placed to create the perfect answers to your challenges, within your budget and in the shortest time. Also, customers can leverage Hurix’s expertise in publication to create promotional and other sales material. |
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