If you have a gift or retail shop, you know that customer experience is everything! Happy customers become repeat customers and are more likely to recommend your business. But how can you ensure good customer experiences with your company? At the heart of a great customer experience is your staff! Training your employees is crucial to improving your customer service and increasing revenue. And the digital world has made this even easier with lots of online options for training your gift shop staff.
But first, it’s important to understand why training your retail employees is important. Here are six reasons why you need to train your gift shop or retail staff.
Why you should train your gift shop staff
1. More impulse purchases
Few customers walk into a gift shop with a clear idea of what to buy. They’re there mostly out of curiosity. When you train your staff on how to guide customer experiences, you’ll ensure that your customers discover more products.
With training, your staff are more likely to encourage customers to find gifts and souvenirs best suited to their interests. Customized interactions like these would result in more impulse purchases by customers.
2. Faster and easier checkouts
With the right training, your gift shop or retail staff are more likely perform their tasks better. Your employees should be comfortable with the current procedures for interacting with customers and be able to carry out transactions more quickly.
These factors should optimize your business operations. The faster the customer interactions, the more customers your gift shop would be able to handle.
3. Less turnover
No tour or travel operator wants to repeatedly find new staff and train them. This costs you both money and time, and it takes your focus away from other important areas of your business.
When you train your gift shop employees, they are able to do their jobs more effectively. This can result in fewer customer complaints and higher sales, so employees are more likely to stay with your business. This can result in increased revenue, which also makes it easier for you to keep your employees.
4. Increased revenue
Trained staff have a better chance of creating great customer experiences, which can result in more satisfied customers. Happy customers are then encouraged to spend more when your staff members are friendly and helpful during their interactions with customers.
Additionally, happy customers might end up buying more products, not only for themselves but for their family and friends as well. Your staff should also be able to up-sell your company’s products and services. All these factors translate to more revenue for your business!
5. Better online reputation
The travel and tourism industry runs on online reputation. If your customers find your staff to be unfriendly or slow, they might complain online. Negative or unsatisfactory customer experiences can have a serious effect on your brand equity.
So, if customers are delighted with their gift shop experience, they are more likely to give positive reviews of your business and recommend your services to other people, which would also get you more customers!
6. Better shopping experience
It’s not just the activities that sum up the customer experience; if you’re an adventure tour operator, every little thing counts! All minor interactions add up to deliver a guest experience, and gift shops are a crucial part of it.
If customers are satisfied with the way your gift shop staff treats them, it will better their shopping experience with your business. As a result, this will increase the chances of your customers buying more in your gift shop, leaving good reviews online, and recommending your products and services to friends and family!
Digital training to save time
Clearly, having properly trained staff can have a significant impact on your business. Yet, training employees can present its own set of challenges. It can cost your business money. It’s expensive to hire a trainer to come to your site and hold a workshop. It would also be expensive to send your staff to a training camps. And lastly, if you’re training staff yourself, it can take a lot of your time and money to get your employees up to speed, especially if someone quits.
But now, the digital world offers solutions to these problems! Your employees can train online. There are platforms with online training options specifically designed for gift shop and retail employees. Your employees are able to now complete training wherever they are, through their smartphones, computers, or tablets!
Top 5 resources for training your gift shop or retail staff
TalentLMS
If you want to transform your gift shop or retail staff into product experts, TalentLMS is the platform to use! This is a great way to introduce and train your seasonal staff on your retail operations without you having to do it in person.
While it may take some of your time to create your own learning modules and lessons, it’s easy, and your content can be reused for new hires. TalentLMS customers are happy with its uninterrupted services and vouch for its ability to reduce handle times. TalentLMS also makes it easy to track the progress of your employees’ training.
Lessonly
Do you want to use a learning platform that can provide fast and reliable training for your retail staff? Lessonly differentiates from other online learning platforms with its ease of use and speed. The platform claims that it can vastly improve your employees’ productivity.
With just a little instruction, you can create your learning content for your company and employees. You can also provide your staff with personalized feedback, which will give them relevant input on how and where to improve. If what you need is simplified training, this is your tool.
Retail Training Services
If creating your own training lessons doesn’t appeal to you, another great option for online training is Retail Training Services. This company is geared toward small retailers, which should be of interest to anyone operating a travel and tour company. Retail Training Services offers courses to improve your store operations, marketing, and merchandising, and so on.
What makes this platform different from TalentLMS and Lessonly is that the courses are pre-made and ready to buy, which can save time and effort on your part while still getting your employees trained for working for your business.
The Retail Doctor
Designed by Bob Phibbs, one of the most famous small business consultants, The Retail Doctor aims its services at small and independent retailers. Its current focus is to enable small businesses to get back to their pre-Covid shape through double-digit monthly sales!
The goal of the online course from The Retail Doctor is to teach important retail skills to employees while empowering their managers to track their progress. This is another option for a pre-made and ready-for-purchase course to train your employees!
PicThrive
Nothing captures great tour experiences better than photos and videos. PicThrive has been changing the way tour operators can sell these products and improve guest experiences. The platform helps automate photo management and sharing, which makes tour operations look modern, digital, and customer-friendly.
PicThrive offers free online retail sales training on their easy-to-use platform to help your employees interact with your customers sell more photos and videos. This frees up your time to manage other aspects of your business!
Train staff to create a memorable guest experience
Having properly trained staff is vital to your operations. You can offer the best products and services on the market, and still get negative reviews if your employees aren’t able to complete their tasks effectively and efficiently. In short, having properly trained, friendly, and attentive staff will help your customers have positive experiences, which will result in more positive reviews, recommendations, and revenue for your business! The availability of online training platforms and resources makes it very possible and cost-effective to train your gift shop staff.
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