What to consider when investing in a new LMS for your retail chain!

An LMS is an important investment for any organisation, but especially for retail chains. Your staff are the ones who interact with customers on a daily basis. They are the face of your brand and often the deciding factor in whether a customer returns to the store.

Retail is also an industry characterised by high staff turnover. Investing in developing and training your staff can help reduce turnover, but more importantly, it lets you unlock the potential your staff already have. Make sure they become a real competitive advantage over e-commerce and other stores.

That said, choosing an LMS is not easy. It is an industry that has grown rapidly since Covid-19. There are many different options to choose from. In this article, we cover the key areas to consider when choosing an LMS for your retail organisation.

An LMS should evolve with your organisation

An LMS is a tool for the entire organisation. Sales uses it to train their salespeople to give customers a better experience and sell more. Marketing uses it to improve campaign execution. HR uses it to increase employee satisfaction, reduce turnover, and improve onboarding.

It is when the entire organisation gets involved in knowledge sharing that an LMS has real impact. Try to assess whether the solution will still be relevant for your company in 5 years. Does the provider seem responsive to your needs? Will the solution evolve with you?

Simplicity

This principle applies to any system an organisation purchases, but it is especially important for an LMS within a retail chain. It must be easy to get started and easy to use. Retail often has higher staff turnover compared to many other industries, along with many hourly employees. This means the system must be extremely easy for users to navigate. It also needs to be simple for everyone in administrative roles, whether it is the CEO or store managers. It should not take unnecessary time, resources, or energy to use the platform.

Integration

This is often a major challenge when purchasing a new LMS. The technical aspect is frequently resource- and time-intensive, and even then there is no guarantee that everything will work in the end. From a technical perspective, there is one thing that absolutely must work: automated user management.

If you are a larger organisation, you do not want to manually add and remove users. As soon as you add or update a user in your HR system, it should automatically update your LMS.

Appearance

Some may dismiss this as irrelevant, but it is incredibly important. Employees need to feel proud of their company, and having a system that looks modern, polished, and is customised to match the company's visual identity matters.

Lower the barrier to usage

Here is what helps with that:

Mobile-friendly

Training content must be accessible on mobile devices, because not everyone has a personal computer and the store computer is primarily used to help customers. However, everyone has a smartphone, so employees can complete training from home as well.

Personal email address

If the retail chain does not provide a company email, the LMS should also work with a personal email address. This way, employees can start their training before their employment even begins, as part of the company's preboarding.

Follow-up

The real value you can get from an LMS lies in the follow-up. Statistics on which employees, stores, or regions have completed training are what allow you to take your organisation to the next level. With this information, you know where and whom to focus your efforts on to improve the organisation.

It is through follow-up that you can begin to understand the impact an LMS has on the results you want to achieve, whether that is higher sales or happier employees.

Support

A good LMS should be simple enough that you do not need support. But that does not mean you should eliminate it entirely. Support and guidance should always be available to you as a customer. Questions about technical aspects or usage will always come up, so make sure you feel confident in the support the LMS provider offers. In addition to a dedicated contact person, it helps if there is a resource centre where customers can go to find answers to their questions.