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

An LMS is an important investment for any organisation, but it is particularly important for retailers. Staff are the ones who talk to the customer on a daily basis. They are the face of the business and are often the deciding factor whether the customer visits the store again. 

Retail is also a sector characterised by high staff turnover. Investing in staff development and training can help you to reduce staff turnover and, above all, exploit the potential of your staff. Make sure they become a real competitive advantage over e-commerce and other retailers. 

However, choosing an LMS is not easy. It is an industry that, since Covid 19, has grown fast and a lot. There are many different options to choose from. In this article, we'll go through various points to consider when choosing an LMS for your retail organisation. 

An LMS should evolve with your organisation

An LMS is a tool for the whole organisation. Sales uses the tool to train their sales people to give the customer a better experience and sell more. Marketing uses it to improve the way it works with campaigns. HR uses it to increase employee satisfaction, reduce employee turnover and improve onboarding. 

It is when the whole organisation is involved in the knowledge work that LMS has a real impact. Try to assess whether this solution will be relevant for your company in 5 years time. Do companies feel responsive to your needs? Will the solution evolve with you?

Simple 

This rule is applicable to any system an organization purchases, but it becomes especially important for an LMS within a retail chain. It should be easy to get started and easy to use. In retail, there is often a higher staff turnover compared to many other industries as well as many hourly employees. This demands that the system is very easy to use for the users. It also needs to be easy for everyone in administrative roles whether it is the CEO or store managers. It must not take unnecessary time, resources and energy to use the software. 

Integration

This is usually a major challenge when purchasing a new LMS. The technical part is often resource and time consuming and it still does not guarantee that everything will work in the end. From a technical perspective there is one thing that has to work, the automation of user management. 

If you're a large organisation, you don't want to be manually adding and removing users. As soon as you add or update a user in your HR system, it should automatically update your LMS. 

Nice

This is something that some dismiss as irrelevant but it is incredibly important. Employees need to feel proud of the company and to have a system that looks good, feels modern and is aligned with the company's graphic profile. 

Lowering the barrier to use

What facilitates this is:

Mobile-friendly  

Training content must be accessible on mobile devices because not everyone has a personal computer and the shop computer is primarily used to help customers. On the other hand, everyone has a smartphone and then the employee can also complete the training from home

Private e-mail addresses

If the retailer does not provide the person with company email, it should also work to use the LMS with their private email address. Then you can get started with the training before the employment has started as part of the company's pre-boarding. 

Follow-up

The real value to be gained from an LMS is the follow-up. The statistics on which employees, stores or regions have completed the training is what will allow you to take your organisation to the next level. With this information, you know where and who to focus on to improve your organization.  

It's through monitoring that you can begin to understand the impact of an LMS on the outcome you want to achieve, whether that's higher sales or happier staff. 

Suport

A good LMS should be simple enough that you don't need support. Though that doesn't mean you should eliminate it altogether. Support and guidance should always be there for you, the customer. Questions about technical aspects or usage will always come up so make sure you feel comfortable with the support the LMS provider offers. In addition to a contact person, it helps if there is a resource bank that the customer can turn to for answers to their questions.