Advanced Employee Training: How an LMS Can Change the Game

Raise Your Frontline Employee Training

The role of frontline staff in a retail business cannot be overstated. They are the face of your brand: the ones who interact with customers every day, solve problems, and ensure that the entire shopping experience goes smoothly. It’s no surprise, then, that a lack of quality training for front-line employees can seriously hurt your retail company.

Let’s take a look at which sales business metrics suffer from poor employee training, how this relates to a return to outdated training methods, and how you can turn things around with 4 effective, results-driven LMS skills.

How Poor Frontline Employee Training Affects Your Sales Business

Inadequate or inconsistent employee training leads to:

• High number of employees. Untrained workers can feel stressed and unsupported, leading them to look for other jobs. You end up spending a lot of resources on hiring and training new employees, which disrupts operations and has a significant impact on you.
• Low levels of customer satisfaction. Without proper training, your employees will experience poor communication, slow service, and limited product knowledge. This leads to unhappy customers, fewer repeat visits, and negative word of mouth.
• Poor sales performance. Inadequately trained employees miss sales or cross-selling opportunities and struggle with customer inquiries. These missed opportunities hurt sales and affect profits.
• A bad sign reputation. Defective service due to poor training damages your brand image, making it difficult to build customer loyalty.

Key Features of Ineffective Frontline Staff Training

To avoid a decline in your sales performance, it’s important to identify the signs of ineffective frontline employee training:

• Outdated formats. Printed manuals, text-heavy PDFs, or static presentations fail to engage employees, harming information retention.
• Difficulty finding information. Your employees find it difficult to get information quickly because resources are scattered or limited.
• Lack of training time. Your employees should check out new manuals or guides during their lunch break or review them on the sales floor between customers.
• Inadequate manual training. Your training doesn’t provide hands-on practice, so employees have trouble applying the knowledge to real jobs and customer interactions.
• Inconsistent training quality. Different stores or departments receive different levels of training, so your company cannot achieve a standardized quality of service.
• Inefficient testing methods. If your testing is inconsistent and spotty, you cannot assess how well employees understand the material and if they are using it effectively.

4 Best LMS Features to Improve Your Frontline Employee Training

A Learning Management System (LMS) is a solution that improves sales training for both employees and managers. The combination of intelligent automation and robust capabilities saves valuable time and resources while providing a solid foundation for consistent, high-quality skill development.

Check out these top 4 LMS features that will give your sales training the perfect fit to improve the performance of your frontline employees and improve your sales business metrics.

1. Internal Knowledge Base: Give Your Employees a Resource Hub They Can Depend On

One of the biggest challenges store managers face is dealing with training resources that are spread across multiple platforms. This leads to inconsistent product information, payment delays, and wasted time for both managers and employees trying to track down the right items.

To fix this, including important information in the internal knowledge base (KB) is essential. A unified repository allows employees to quickly find, share, and manage resources, ensuring they feel prepared and confident in their roles.

Key benefits of internal KB include:

• High sales floor efficiency
• Easy store-to-store communication
• Less time spent on repetitive customer questions
• Accelerated onboarding of new employees
• Improved product knowledge and service

Did you know?

In iSpring Learn LMS, you can easily build and maintain a strong internal knowledge base. Simply go to the user portal and click Knowledge Base on the main menu ribbon. You’ll find yourself on an intuitive, easy-to-navigate page where you can collect, organize, and add all the resources and information your front-line staff might need.

2. On-the-Job Training Modules: Monitor Performance and Assess Skills in a Smart Way

Many retail businesses still rely on manual methods such as paper forms or spreadsheets to assess employee skills, leading to inconsistent assessments and common errors. The process varies between stores and makes tracking and providing timely feedback difficult.

An LMS like iSpring Learn solves these problems by offering on-the-job training modules. They conduct best-in-class employee performance appraisals and provide real-time insights to maintain and improve standards across all areas.

Store managers, consultants, and supervisors can use the skills of on-the-job training for several purposes:

• Creating customized checklists for different roles and tasks. For example, a cashier’s checklist might focus on tasks such as processing transactions quickly, managing returns, and using promotions properly. This checklist clearly outlines the performance expectations of employees in their roles.
• Lead observation times for assessing adherence to work standards. Use this checklist during training, certification, or role changes for consistent evaluation across the organization.
• Giving structured feedback. Quickly assess tasks as employees complete them during on-the-job training, providing immediate feedback on areas of strength and improvement.
• Monitoring staff performance and skill development. Get detailed reports on each work session to see how well your employees are performing in their role. Use these to get grading and job certification.

Did you know?

You can easily schedule and schedule on-the-job training (OJT) sessions for your employees right in iSpring Learn. To do this, go to the OJT Sessions section of the LMS and click New Session. Once your employees have completed their OJT sessions, they will also see audience feedback and document their areas of growth. Managers and supervisors can then use the results of the sessions to make informed decisions about promotions or role adjustments.

3. Manager Dashboard: Keeping Management in the Loop

Keeping senior management informed of employee progress, training effectiveness, and compliance is critical, especially for large retail chains with multiple locations. Tracking training across multiple stores can be difficult due to inconsistent systems and data.

An LMS makes this easy by providing an integrated dashboard where managers can easily monitor performance and access key training data in real-time without the need for complex reports or additional administrator access.

Did you know?

In iSpring Learn, store managers can see how many employees have completed the training program, and how many have yet to start. The User Issues Block will show which employees missed deadlines or failed inspections. Managers, and coaching managers, will be notified in advance to resolve this.

The My Team section provides learning statistics for all employees: date of last visit and number of completed, failed, overdue, and expired courses. With this input, managers can see who is making the best progress and learn additional resources and recommend them to the talent pool. Managers can easily view team progress as a percentage and use it as an additional KPI.

4. Mobile Learning: Empowering Frontline Workers to Learn on the Go

Mobile learning is a must for front-line employees who are constantly on the move at the point of sale, checkout, or repurchase. With an LMS available on their smartphones, employees can complete courses, review product information, or brush up on customer service skills at any time, whether they’re on break, on the go, or in between assignments. The mobile app also ensures that employees never miss important updates: push notifications notify them of deadlines, announcements, assignments, and upcoming events on their phones or tablets immediately.

Did you know?

The iSpring Learn mobile app enables offline learning. Frontline staff can download the courses in advance and train at any time, even without an internet connection. This flexibility is important in areas with poor Wi-Fi, such as when traveling or in large areas with a solid signal.

Trainers and managers can access all progress and performance reports through a mobile LMS to stay informed and track employee development in real time. All learning progress is automatically synced once the employee is back online.

Pro tip: You can customize your mobile LMS to reflect your company’s visual identity and style. With the request, you will receive a custom LMS mobile app with a unique design with your logo, colors, and other branded features.

Finish it

Poor employee training is a recipe for inconsistent service, frustrated customers, and high profits, all of which inevitably hurt your bottom line. An LMS solves this by providing:

• Automatic training that works
• Easy access to key information
• Systematic skills and performance evaluation methods
• Data-driven training statistics
• Online and offline mobile learning

Thanks to these skills, you will ensure effective training of employees, which will lead to more satisfied customers, higher income, and better brand reputation.