Retail training is an investment that must yield results for your employees, your customers, and your store's bottom line. Keeping records of time and money invested, and what outcomes occurred will allow you to gauge ROI and strengthen employee engagement.
Retail Training ROI
Establishing your ROI reveals training effectiveness, showing where there are development gaps and where value is being added, and helps you justify training expenses. ROI data lets you compare year on year trends and evaluate a particular training program's effectiveness, and cost against other programs you may try.
The standard formula to compute retail training ROI is below. Generally, managers start this calculation by taking revenue that has been identified as a result of training and calculates against training costs. However, you can instead calculate other values, such as time efficiency, as the lead metric to compare training costs against; you'll need to make sure the training costs are in the "same language" as what you are calculating against, though (i.e., if you are comparing time, the other variables should be time values).
In a revenue example, let's say you ran a training half-day ahead of Labor Day sales that cost $1,200 for 20 employees. The training ran for 4 hours, and your employees earn $12 an hour, meaning you spent an additional $960 for a total of $2,160 on the training.
After Labor Day, you run your sales against last Labor Day's results and establish that your store netted $10,000 more profit than last year. In this example, you would have an ROI from that half-day training of 363%, calculated as:
Other ROI metrics can be quantified to paint a further picture of how well your retail training is doing. Examples of other metrics include:
- Retail employee satisfaction
- Are employees complaining, bored, or happy about training? You can use a brief rating quiz to gather this feedback.
- Are employees complaining, bored, or happy about training? You can use a brief rating quiz to gather this feedback.
- Employee learning retention
- Demonstrated knowledge via testing or proven on the sales floor with customers, managers, or peers
- Improved sales
- New customer wins, increased sales, larger sales values per order, shorter closing times, etc.
- Customer feedback
- What are customers saying in-store or online through complaints, compliments, return business, etc?
Gather a variety of metrics for a holistic view to evaluate and improve your training methods for the best ROI.
Ultimate Guide to Training Retail Employees
Tracking Retail Employee Engagement
Effective training methods are not going to be boring or stagnant. Retailers that focus on providing constant engagement will have far better results than stores that fail to recognize how engagement impacts training.
Disengaged retail employees are a problem. A report from Quantum Workplace indicates that nearly 35% of retail employees feel disengaged at work. The report maintains a direct correlation between engaged employees and low turnover, higher sales, and positive customer metrics. And Total Retail reports that companies with highly engaged employees outperform competitors by 147%.
Engagement questions to ask as they relate to training include:
- What tactics are you using to make learning fun?
- Are you using micro-learning (mLearning), gamification, group learning, etc?
- Are rewards provided that recognize employee performance and behavior?
- Do you have BYOD policies that give employees agile ways to work and learn?
- Are managers and team leaders soliciting and listening to employee feedback to make necessary improvements?
Employee engagement needs to be considered in overall training strategies as the frame of mind of your staff while they learn and interact with customers has overarching ramifications.
Gamification Tips for Better Employee Engagement
Robust Mobile Training & Engagement Platform
Not all retail training platforms or LMSs are made equal. What do you need?
- Are you looking for vendor training while maintaining social distancing?
- Do you need a way to easily and consistently communicate policy changes and new product details?
- Are you doing enough to track how well you are training and engaging with your teams?
SellPro's platform uses incredible engagement techniques and rewards that pull employees in to learn through original games, concise vendor-sponsored training, and more—all from their mobile phones. Training modules are brief, fun, and can be done during downtime on the sales floor.
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Additional Resources:
Gamification Tips for Better Retail Employee Engagement
3 Retailer Engagement Strategies to Improve Customer Experiences
Post-Lockdown Game Plan: Bringing Retail Employees Back to Work
