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LMS INSIGHTS: RETAIL SECTOR

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About Totara

Totara Learning is rapidly transforming the learning technology software market. Our products include the award-winning Totara LMS, a functionally rich learning management platform and Totara Social, an enterprise Social Learning Network designed to foster collaboration, communication and knowledge sharing.

Totara Learning products are open source, highly flexible and bring powerful freedoms to all organisations with formal and informal learning needs, both within the workplace and the extended enterprise. They are used by many industry sectors, including finance, retail, energy, health, government and not-for-profit organisations. Customers range from small to large multinational corporations – a testament to our innovation, robust versatility and scalability.

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ABOUT TOTARA .......................................2

THE RETAIL SECTOR’S KEY CHALLENGES ...................................4

HOW ARE WE USING LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES TODAY? .........................6

GETTING UP TO SPEED .......................... 10

TOTARA TOP TIPS FOR RETAIL ............. 12

THINKING OUT OF THE BOX .................. 14

TOTARA LMS IN THE RETAIL SECTOR .................................... 18

WHAT’S NEXT FOR RETAIL? ................. 22

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The Towards Maturity retail sector report identifies some barriers specific

to the learning of retail employees. Of the retail organisations surveyed:

The retail sector’s key challenges

Every sector has its own unique challenges, and the retail sector is no different. These challenges pose opportunities for L&D teams to get involved and offer real solutions in the form of training and development, making it critical for us to be aware of the barriers facing retailers today. So what are some of the problems we face?

Firstly, high staff turnover is a major issue for many retailers. The retail workforce tends to be relatively young and mobile, meaning employees are coming and going all the time. The same is true of managers, many of whom may stay in a role for a few months before moving to a new organisation, meaning replacements have to be trained constantly. This also requires a solid induction and onboarding programme, ensuring new employees get up to speed as quickly as possible.

One of the main reasons for this rapid staff turnover could be a lack of awareness of the progression opportunities within many retail organisations. It may be difficult for retail assistants on the shop floor to visualise how they will progress, meaning they leave before exploring further opportunities. This could be as a result of little or no performance management, and no clear learning path to help them work towards new roles.

Working in retail rarely requires employees to have access to a good internet connection or to use devices often, which explains the technical limitations faced by many organisations. However, these figures also reveal the potential for retail employees to ‘learn how to learn’, and for L&D staff to help them find the right content at the right time.

So what are retail organisations doing to combat some of these challenges?

84%say unreliable IT

infrastructure, low bandwidth or other technical factors

restrict learning opportunities.

68%struggle with a lack of

skills among employees to manage their own learning.

74%find the cost of

setup, development and maintenance

prohibitively expensive.

68%also find that L&D staff

lack the skills to implement and manage e-learning.

Top drivers for learning change in the retail industry:

Increasing accessibility

and flexibility is essential.

Speeding up and improving the application of learning in

the workplace.

Improving the quality of learning delivered.

Creating a more consistent

learning experience.

Towards Maturity, 2015

58%say that staff have insufficient

access to computers for e-learning to be worthwhile.

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Just like Totara LMS customers in other sectors, retail organisations use their LMS to deliver key learning programmes for onboarding, compliance, product knowledge and sales skills. This will probably continue to be the case. However, we’re seeing some interesting new areas emerging as businesses discover more opportunities for harnessing the power of the learning platform.

Pre-boarding is the first of these obvious growth areas in the retail sector. During key periods of the year, e.g. Christmas, retail organisations hire very large numbers of staff, and the LMS enables them to provide access to essential information before these new employees start work. This gives new starters a reassuring insight into what they can expect, and helps them get up to speed. Several City & Guilds Kineo clients use these pre-boarding areas to deliver things like till training ‘tasters’.

The role of line managers is crucial in supporting key learning programmes and ensuring well-managed operations, and many of our customers are developing

distinct areas of their LMS devoted to all the resources, tools and activities that new or established line managers need.

Retail organisations now have accountability for the effective onboarding and compliance of their suppliers, and certainly among our clients, this change has led to a number of supplier ‘microsites’ being created. These areas are part of the main Totara LMS, but are often visually distinct, and use audience segmentation to ensure that suppliers do not have access to the wider suite of corporate training for internal employees.

At City & Guilds Kineo, we have a number of clients who rely on a wide range of global retailers to sell their products. These extended enterprise Totara LMS implementations tend to be characterised by slick design and a focus on best-in-class user experience, as they need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other lavish websites to attract and hold the attention of retail staff. These platforms are usually part of a wider campaign, incorporating social media, competitions, and other game-style elements.

Stephen Foy, Solutions Consultant, City & Guilds Kineo

The good news is that retailers are starting to use more learning technologies now than ever before, for a wider variety of purposes. With many clients in the retail sector, Platinum Partner City & Guilds Kineo shared their expertise about the way retail organisations today are making the most of learning technologies.

Retailers tend to focus their efforts on two primary areas – onboarding and compliance. More specialist retailers will spend more time on product knowledge and sales/customer service get prioritised in cycles. Management development is also growing in focus and importance.

Steven Lowenthal, CEO, Kineo US

In my experience, retailers mainly use learning technologies for:

1. Compliance training, i.e. ensuring staff are able to work in store after they have completed initial health and safety training, food safety training etc.

2. Product training, i.e. making sure that staff have sufficient information and knowledge about products (both new and existing) so that they can have meaningful conversations with customers

3. Induction training – to get staff up to speed faster and to reduce staff turnover.

Steve Mackenzie, Solutions Consultant, City & Guilds Kineo

How are we using learning technologies today?

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InductionFor many retailers, bringing on thousands of new permanent and seasonal staff each year can make training time consuming and expensive. Gamification offers a way to get new starters up to speed with the brand, its values and its products quickly. Introducing engaging scenarios into the game can also help new employees understand the way the organisation approaches different day-to-day challenges for a consistent customer experience.

ComplianceRetail organisations are subject to many rules and regulations, ranging from money handling to security and health and safety. Delivering this information with a game can be a way to make traditionally ‘dry’ content more engaging. For instance, learning the correct procedure for dealing with returning goods to a store can be made into a more memorable experience by playing a game than simply reading from a manual.

Product knowledgeRetailers are constantly dealing with new product ranges, and it can be difficult for employees to stay on top of these. Games give learners the chance to explore products online, ensuring they’re better informed when it comes to answering customers’ questions. Updating the products in the game each season also offers a cost-effective way to stay on top of constantly changing product catalogues.

Pharmacy giant Boots wanted to change the way 45,000 employees felt about their product knowledge training in the busy Christmas period. Mind Click quickly identified that tapping into learners’ emotional responses to competition and reward would be an effective way to make learning enjoyable, and used their game engine to set up a digital board game to get employees engaging with their seasonal products.

The game has been a resounding success, boosting engagement rates by 200% in Christmas 2015 and improving completion rates by 50%.

The game’s success has been recognised by other key stakeholders at Boots, who are now looking for more ways to gamify their learning.

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Spotlight on… gamification

Gamification remains a hot topic in the L&D community, and with good reason. More and more organisations continue to seek a unique ability to motivate learners, boost engagement and increase the effectiveness of learning, and it’s no different in the retail sector Games can play a valuable role in the learning programmes of retail organisations, and can be easily embedded into an LMS. They can be applied in a variety of ways, including:

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The most pressing requirements that our retail customers present to us are around compliance reporting. Anyone involved in the safety and legality of operations in a retail business knows all about spending a large part of their time working on large Excel pivot tables, with conditional formatting and complex filters to find out how compliant they are.

To get away from these complex reports, these customers absolutely need a way of easily creating graphical summary reports, so that they can see their level of compliance in a number of areas (e.g. asbestos safety, food safety) at a glance. These reports need to be filterable by region/store/department and line manager and they need to be dynamically fed with completion data from the LMS.

Hand-in-hand with reporting features is the ability for retailers to segment their workforce, so that they can direct the right content to each group. Totara LMS’s audience management features are central to meeting this requirement,

as is the ability to take a regular feed of current user and organisational data in the LMS to ensure that reports can be trusted.

Since Totara LMS 2.7, retail customers are now much more able to simply personalise the experience of many of their learners by providing tailored homepages, themes and content, and the continuous improvement of Totara LMS’s UI helps us deliver a really great user experience - most retail learners want a web experience, rather than an LMS experience.

Of course, Totara LMS’s responsive theme means that retail customers are now able to deliver learning and performance support directly to the shop floor or warehouse or kitchen, by providing staff with access to store tablets. This change has enabled retailers to sidestep the challenge of providing formal training rooms with desktop PCs and maintaining wired network access. Over the past 12 months, there has also been a surge in interest for offline SCORM access, which we believe will only increase.

Stephen Foy, Solutions Consultant, City & Guilds Kineo

Getting up to speed

Flexible design is essential. Retailers need to implement changes, such as new training initiatives, very quickly within their organisation so their LMS needs to support this.

Steve Mackenzie, Solutions Consultant, City & Guilds Kineo

In the retail sector, being able to respond fast to change is vital, and much of this preparation comes from effective training. The ability to immediately comply with new industry regulations, get up to speed with entire new product lines and train seasonal employees quickly can cement the success of a retailer, keeping the workforce responsive and agile. City & Guilds Kineo spoke to us about why being able to train and report on progress quickly is so essential for retailers today.

From 2012 to 2020, the UK retail workforce is projected to

increase by 100,000 to

3.2 million.

Source: Webanywhere, 201540%

Staff turnover in the retail industry.

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Audience-based visibilityIf you’re working with multiple groups or organisations and need to enable learners to only see the courses relating to their organisation, audience-based visibility is the key.

Navigate to Site administration > Advanced features > Enable audience-based visibility and place a tick in the box. Be mindful that when you enable this feature all courses including previously hidden courses become visible.

Now within the settings of each course you will be able to set who can see the course throughout the site: ‘Visible to all users’, ‘Visible to enrolled users’ or ‘Visible to enrolled users and members of the selected audiences’.

Your next step is to create the audiences and assign the learning they can see. Navigate to Site administration > Users > Accounts > Audiences and create your audience (the Totara Learning help site has a comprehensive step-by-step guide).

For each audience you create, click on the Visible learning tab, then click on Add courses/Add programs/Add certifications and select the courses, programs and certification you would like that audience to see.

Once you’ve completed this for each audience, you’re done and now you can ensure that your learning is targeted to the right people

Georgina Christodoulou, Operations Support Lead, Catalyst IT Australia

Totara top tips for retail

If you are responsible for L&D in a retail organisation, what can you do to ensure you’re making the most of the technologies available? We spoke to technical experts Catalyst to find out their top tips for retail organisations looking to set up Totara LMS as part of their learning strategy.

When you have a number of people creating course content, it’s very possible that the look and feel of each course can vary.

One way to minimise differences in look and feel is to create course templates that can be backed up and restored. You can create any number of course templates as your organisation needs. You might have a template for face-to-face only courses, a template for SCORM-only courses, or you could even create templates that are specific to brands, departments, work groups etc. In this way you maintain consistency throughout all the courses in your site and cut down on the work involved in setting up a course.

Georgina Christodoulou, Operations Support Lead, Catalyst IT Australia

Got any tips of your own for retail organisations? Share them with us on Twitter using #totaratoptips.

A bespoke look and feelCreate cool bespoke images using PowerPoint. Yes, you read that correctly. If you’re not a graphic designer but need to put together some bespoke graphics, images and icons, you can use PowerPoint’s built in drawing tools to customise images. This could include removing backgrounds and joining together multiple images to make one final image - think using a background image and putting cut out people on top. You can even use the shapes and combine them to make your own icons.

Georgina Christodoulou, Operations Support Lead, Catalyst IT Australia

Open LMSRetail can be a very time-poor industry in terms of L&D, and often has a very unique set of challenges. What we’re seeing is companies expressing a clear need to do more to adjust to these challenges. We think looking at having a more open LMS that supports shop floor learning and shorter, bite-sized learning content is a logical approach. Absolutely vital to this is having a LMS that supports the shifting needs of learners and allows this type of learning to be effectively delivered.

William Towse, Business Development Manager in Retail Sector, Mind Click

Thinking out of the box

As the retail sector becomes more comfortable with learning technologies, it is time to start thinking creatively about how we can apply technologies in retail organisations. Many retailers opt for very simple out-of-the-box e-learning, but there’s so much more potential there. We asked some of our Totara Partners for their top tips for thinking outside out-of-the-box courses.

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Provide individual dashboardsProvide learners with a personalised dashboard to help them make the most of the available courses and resources. This should deliver information relevant to their role, with direct links to areas of interest, relevant courses and a progress overview to maximise the user experience.

Jonny McAlister, Head of Sales & Marketing, Synergy Learning

Mobile accessIncreasingly retailers are keen to allow their staff to access the LMS in different ways – particularly from mobile devices.

Steve Mackenzie, Solutions Consultant, City & Guilds Kineo

Make training a priorityOftentimes, due to the high rate of turnover, viewing training as a cost or overhead and an unwillingness to pay hourly employees during training has led to the deprioritisation of training among retail employees. By extension of training being viewed as a cost, this can lead to minimal investment in infrastructure for reliable and fast connectivity and outdated look and feel, creating a monotonous user experience. Training in the retail space can be reinforced by paying employees for time spent training, providing financial incentives, employee recognition and providing road maps for aspirational positions.

Jason Miller, Director of Business Development, Synegen

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Learner authenticationEmployees for many retail organisations don’t have company email addresses, posing a unique challenge for what individual authentication can be used. This means that a retail LMS would need to authenticate them via a NI number, till code number or something personal to that employee.

William Towse, Business Development Manager in Retail Sector, Mind Click

On-the-job trainingProvide information to employees as and when it’s needed. On-the-job training is especially important in the retail sector, and providing quick access to knowledge on a mobile device or POS terminal can mean the difference between a mediocre customer experience and a great one

Patrick Kelly, Digital Marketing Manager, Webanywhere

Scenario-based learningMove away from boring text-based e-learning. Anyone can read a document but how can you test someone’s knowledge on dealing with a scenario in the real world? There are some great authoring tools that allow you to create great scenario-based learning. This takes e-learning to the next level and away from text-dense learning to interactive modules where people can put their skills into practice before they hit the retail floor. Give someone a real life scenario and have them navigate their way to a resolution. If they make incorrect choices the resolution will be less than ideal; however if they make the right choices along the way - happy days!

Georgina Christodoulou, Operations Support Lead, Catalyst IT Australia

Personalise the learning experienceWith high numbers of staff moving in, out and between retail roles, a new joiner may already have prior skills, knowledge and experience. Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all learning programme, you can use diagnostic assessments and pre-tests to recognise existing competence and guide individuals to the learning they need. By taking into account this context and personalising the experience, not only is this more motivating and engaging for each employee; it removes unnecessary duplication and saves both time and money. The Audience Management features of Totara LMS are ideally suited to designing blended learning programmes that adapt to each learner’s needs.

Open Badges offer the opportunity for staff moving in and out of a retail roles (such as those taking on jobs in peak periods) to demonstrate a certified level of competence and skill that is recognised by the organisation, further accelerating their onboarding and ensuring they can operate at the desired performance levels

Lars Hyland, Chief Commercial Officer, Totara Learning

Reward learnersImplement a ‘points system’ when learners complete courses within the learning portal. Employees can then earn additional points by sharing their results on social media, which can be redeemed for rewards from the organisation. Retail staff can also be rewarded for setting personal goals, and based on the achievement of both personal and company goals, they can be awarded an employee compensation bonus to boost the motivation to train.

Jason Miller, Director of Business Development, Synegen

User-generated contentUser-generated content and augmented reality are key areas of interest for the retail sector. Most of the experts in various retail functions are on the shop floor or in distribution centre. It makes sense for retail organisations to encourage these experts to record themselves doing things well and sharing those video or audio clips via the LMS. Some organisations are already using video clips of learners as evidence of compliance.

Steve Mackenzie, Solutions Consultant, City & Guilds Kineo

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Shimano EuropeShimano is a Japanese multinational manufacturing company, which, among other things, makes high-quality bike parts. They needed a way to reach bike mechanics who worked with their products across Europe to replace physical brochures, which become out of date quickly, and to move from product knowledge alone to certification.

Shimano partnered with Neo to create a Totara LMS which offers geographically distributed, highly mobile bike mechanics a personalised learning experience wherever they are. Mechanics can also earn Open Badges which certify them in certain areas of product knowledge, which stay with them to ensure evidence of their expertise moves with them. The platform supports 30,000 mechanics across Europe, with over 800 courses available in 8 languages for user-friendly learning on the move.

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Hunkemöller Hunkemöller is Europe’s leading multi-channel lingerie brand, with over 700 stores across Europe. A consistent customer experience across all of its stores is very important to the Hunkemöller brand, and to ensure that this remained the case meant finding a new LMS with content and a look-and-feel to match its five brand values: fun, passionate, inspiring, in-touch and sexy.

Hunkemöller partnered with The Courseware Company and TinQwise to develop a Totara LMS which aligned perfectly to its corporate identity and brand image, as well as four new e-learning modules. Their Totara LMS also supports certifications and Open Badges for portable learning opportunities. More than 75% of employees used the LMS to become certified in the four weeks after launch, with plans to continue building the platform in the future.

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Tesco Leading British supermarket Tesco needed a new learning portal which would offer a great user experience, offer sophisticated learning management to learning teams and avoid per-user licence models, owing to their 400,000-strong workforce. Tesco paired with City & Guilds Kineo to implement a new Totara LMS which would support these goals and save money.

Totara LMS in the retail sector

City & Guilds Kineo made use of some key features and functionality in Totara LMS, including learning paths, online course booking, course feedback and sophisticated reporting. They also implemented a new user-friendly management tool, enabling users to set up learning programmes for specific individuals, job roles and business units and to manage reminders, mandatory learning and re-accreditations, which was integrated into the core Totara LMS product following rigorous testing with Tesco.

This solution saves Tesco £1 million a year on training, and using Totara LMS, City & Guilds Kineo has delivered on its promise of a more user-friendly, cost-effective platform for one of the UK’s largest retailers.

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GNC Global health and nutrition retailer GNC employs 3,000 staff in Mexico alone. They needed to train these geographically dispersed staff in over 640 stores across the country, needing an accessible LMS which delivered an on-brand learning experience and made it easy to track learners’ progress and completion rates.

GNC Mexico worked with Aura Interactiva to implement Totara LMS within just eight weeks. This solution gives staff across Mexico 24/7 anytime, anywhere access to knowledge, with an on-brand look and feel and powerful reporting capabilities. This has also significantly reduced training costs, as GNC Mexico no longer needs to pay for people to travel to classroom training sessions.

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DMG De Mandemakers Groep (DMG) is the market leader in the Dutch kitchen retail market, and also specialises in bathrooms and furniture. They wanted to ensure that every DMG retail store provided a consistent customer experience, and to make sure that all new and current employees share the same product knowledge.

DMG chose to partner with UP learning to build a unique learning environment to train staff across its stores. New starters and existing employees alike receive engaging, personal training, helping them improve their product knowledge and ultimately sell more products. So far, Totara LMS has helped DMG cut its training time from 30 days to just 6 - a reduction of 80%. Previously, it took a year to train around 130 new learners at the same time; now, it takes just 4-5 months, significantly increasing DMG’s capacity to train staff and making the training process more efficient.

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Clas OhlsonAs one of Scandinavia’s largest retailers, a successful learning programme is one of Clas Ohlson’s six long-term strategic aims. Their previous proprietary LMS was not scalable or fit for purpose, so they worked with Totara Partner Webanywhere to design and develop a Totara LMS platform for use in their UK and Finland stores.

Webanywhere delivered a Totara LMS which is scalable, enabling Clas Ohlson to expand their learning offering, and multilingual, helping them target employees internationally. Reporting and quick-access dashboards for managers and team leaders are also available, giving managers a better overview of how their teams are performing and progressing, with a custom time reporting plugin developed to meet requirements in Finland for tax credit training and development.

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SamsungInternational electronics retailer Samsung is committed to supporting third-party retail staff in selling Samsung products through great product knowledge training and by rewarding staff for engaging with the brand. They collaborated with City & Guilds Kineo and creative marketing agency iris Worldwide to revamp its Samsung Backstage platform to create an innovative extended enterprise learning experience targeted at stockists of Samsung products.

Building the site in Totara LMS enabled the design flexibility Samsung needed to create a truly custom solution that worked seamlessly across devices of all sizes. The platform has a strong focus on community engagement, using competitions and Open Badges to motivate learners and maintain momentum. The new LMS has attracted an 85% increase in pages viewed per visit, and a staggering 181% increase in course completions. The LMS also won the 2015 Best Totara Project award for the retail sector.

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With most retailers being geographically dispersed across cities, countries or even continents, it can be hard for employees to understand their role as part of something bigger. That’s why we expect social learning to take off in the retail sector. Offering up networking and knowledge sharing opportunities will benefit retail employees worldwide, who can learn from their peers on the other side of the world for a more consistent customer experience.

Technologies like training games and virtual reality simulations are also expected to become more prominent in the retail sector. Ensure your LMS supports these approaches to learning and brings them seamlessly into your blended programme for the best results.

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With Totara LMS, it’s easy to create personalised learning for all of the audiences within your learner group, whether you want to target them by store, by role, by experience or anything else. Connecting your Totara LMS platform with Totara Social also creates opportunities for collaborative learning experiences, wherever learners are located, bringing together the entire workforce of a national or international retailer.

If you work in the retail sector and would like to know how Totara LMS can help you get the best out of your workforce, get in touch today to speak to a member of the team.

Our accomplishments, in a nutshell, have been: ■ our ability to deliver more consistent

training to a global audience

■ the automated tracking of training completions for legal and workplace compliance training in a single system

■ broadening course library of topics available on-demand across all time zones

TOMS Shoes, a customer of Lambda Solutions

While e-commerce continues to grow, and logistics systems enable delivery to the door within the hour, that doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the high street. Instead, physical retail environments are likely to become more personalised experiences by bringing together in-store technology and consumer devices.

What’s next for retail?

Point of purchase product information - and education - can deepen customer loyalty while reducing transaction times and the volume of product returns; costs which can mean the difference between profit and loss in the typically low margin sector. While online, shopping experience is expected to become much more collaborative and socially influenced.

This provides a great opportunity for learning technology to become much more embedded into day-to-day workflow, offering just-in-time performance support on products and processes that can change on a weekly basis. If we expect our retail employees to offer a personalised service, we should be offering similarly tailored learning experiences. And opting for an extended enterprise LMS helps retailers better connect their customers with their products, helping them feel better informed and closer to the brand.

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