The second wave of Covid 19 has receded and the people are heaving a sigh of relief. There has been a removal of lockdowns in many countries. So, since the situation has improved, people have started shifting to new jobs instead of sticking to their old jobs. Companies are realizing the worth of talent before it leaves them.

The resources are scarce and there are more roles for them. Thus in a way, the demand-supply curve has finally turned in the way of human resources who can choose their jobs based on employee satisfaction offered.

So, how should retail companies attract the eligible resources towards them?

Retail stores know that frontline workers are the most important resources for their organization because they handle customers. In times of the pandemic, they have made things easier for retail stores by managing understaffed stores and ensuring that both they and the customers follow safety procedures. The companies had to extend a real hand of support to these employees during these tough times.

Companies should know how to provide elearning services to employees so that their morale stays boosted when the work conditions change.

This is a major reason why some retail companies are chosen by employees as compared to others because they believe in the latter relating to their brand values through elearning.

The companies can offer offsite elearning services to their frontline workers to teach them more about sales and store management concepts.

Webinars can also be shown to retail employees where they can be taught about merchandising. Higher sales can indeed happen through retail elearning services because of the following reasons:

• Offer customer-focused merchandising: Merchandising is important for a company because it attracts customers to the product store. We all get attracted to the merchandising displays of clothing stores.

Retail merchandising helps a customer understand the value of a brand’s products, and what is his perspective about the based on the brand is shown in retail stores. The company’s brand equity is decided by the color schemes of its products also. For example, an Apple store is never green in color because the brand is about technology. Hence the walls of an Apple store are painted white.

Brand merchandising is an important part of creating the identity of a brand. For example, the McDonald’s restaurant had the Ronald Macdonald character sitting on a chair outside until the character was finally taken away due to the terrorizing clown sightings in 2016 in the US.

The store should be decorated and the merchandising displays must be arranged for holidays such as Easter. The sales are heavy on this holiday because of favorable warmer weather also. During this time there is a major demand for clothes.

Whether the products are placed correctly: The elearning services can teach workers how to perform a retail store audit. It means that they can check whether the right products are placed on the right shelf and whether the expired products have been removed from the shelves because otherwise, the store loses its trust among customers. There should be a count of items on shelves to ensure that the products are completely tracked and none of them has been stolen. The use of signage is also important because it ensures that the customers get drawn to the brand and sales are easier. Such audits are helpful for product companies because they know that they are getting the allotted floor space as promised.

• Learn how to use inventory management software: Elearning services can provide training to the employees about the right use of retail software. This implies that when the retail store employees count the on-shelf goods and the inventory, they know whether any product needs reorder so that it does not go out of stock. This also depends on the past and forecasted sales of the product.

When the retail workers add all such information to the inventory management software it can automatically reorder, saving the hassles for the store manager.

• For shelf verification by managers: Elearning services are also important for managers because they can get to know how the employees are performing. If the employees are showing them older photos of product displays, they can track them down using the software. They can track the time when such photos were taken to ensure that they are the latest. It’s because empty shelves can mean not happening sales, which means a store’s business is getting affected.
• How to make customers buy: Retail employees can also be taught how to make sales by altering the store display. It’s important to have signage related to happiness so that customers feel positive emotions in the store. You can also ensure that there are dog pics in your stores that evoke a positive customer response.

There is also certain software that can help a retail store track what kind of customers buy certain products like their age, gender, demographics, and at what time they buy. So, you can ensure that your product display is designed correctly at a certain time of the year to attract maximum customers.

Elearning services can help store workers learn how to use such software. Such software can also help you design surveys through which you can get to know how many customers of a certain gender are going to shop there on holidays. In 2018, more male shoppers shopped in stores compared to 2017. So this way, when the stores became aware of this trend beforehand, they could arrange their shopping displays that way.

Apart from using the retail store software which uses autoresponder emails to send such surveys, you can also add the URL to the survey on the physical receipt. There can be a QR code of the survey on the receipt also. If your store has a web app make sure customers take part in the survey. The survey can also be added to a kiosk so that customers enter details while buying something.

So store operators can use a lot of techniques to boost sales when they are provided elearning services about new sales and inventory-based software.