Retail LMS Software

Retail businesses, such as warehouse stores and e-tailers, have a common goal—to provide excellent service to their customers. Poor customer service has multiple negative consequences on a business. That's why, you need to train your employees on resolving customer issues with empathy and understanding.

But the question is, how can you train them without taking away too much time from their work? To achieve this, small business retailers should invest in a learning management system (LMS) that's specific to their industry.

Retail LMS software provides automated training to customer service executives, sales assistants, merchandisers and other professionals.

But finding the right solution could be tough for small businesses like yours. Having an overview of the features you need and understanding their benefits will help you purchase the right tool.

We created this guide to help small businesses understand the software, the market, the important features, benefits, and considerations, so that you make an informed purchase.

What Is Retail LMS Software?
Common Features of Retail LMS Software
What Type of Buyer Are You?
Benefits of Retail LMS Software
Market Trends to Understand

What Is Retail LMS Software?

Retail LMS software is a platform that businesses should use to train employees on using sales collaterals, getting product tutorials and participating in knowledge sharing. Retailers can use off-the-shelf and customized training content to create customized courses on store management and merchandising.

The tool lets you create assessments for your staff and evaluate their skills. Based on the test results, trainers can identify the skill gaps and provide personalized training to learners. The assessments could help you assign new roles/responsibilities to your employees based on their skills.

For instance, an employee with good communication skills could switch to a customer executive role and one with good technical skills could be better suited to executing back-end tasks.

The course catalog in Bridge (Source)

Common Features of Retail LMS Software

In this section, we list out the relevant features of retail LMS software that you should look for when evaluating various vendors and their solutions. Identify the features that you need from this list and check whether your shortlisted vendors offer those.

Course management	Helps you manage courses, content distribution, learner profiles, course scheduling, and enrollments.
Course tracking	Tracks the progress of learners in the administered courses or training programs.
Certification and compliance management	Includes setting up, tracking and managing certification programs as well as compliance training.
Course catalog (or course library)	Provides an in-built library of training courses for the generic training needs of many organizations such as sales training.
Proficiency testing/Reporting	Helps businesses assess learner knowledge or skills. It includes analytics and reporting functionality to help users determine their proficiency and identify their learning gaps.
Course authoring (or content authoring)	Provides learners the ability to author their own content and design courses in the LMS.
Social learning	Allows learners to interact with each other by sharing course ratings, commenting and discussing ideas on course forums.
Mobile learning	Provides learners access to training courses on a tablet or mobile device.

What Type of Buyer Are You?

As you begin shortlisting your options for retail LMS solutions, you need to understand the type of buyer you are. This will help you better analyze your requirements and prioritize software features as "must-have" or "optional" for your business.

Based on our research, here are the three most common buyer types:

Chain stores: Such businesses operate in multiple locations. They need an LMS with basic employee onboarding and training for cashiers, storage room staff, retail managers and customer service executives. They typically need features such as course management, proficiency testing, mobile learning, and course tracking.

Supermarkets: These buyers need an LMS to provide their staff up-to-date product knowledge in order to improve customer satisfaction and sales. Supermarket employees need to be aware of the new technologies, such as omnichannel retail and mobile point-of-sale (mPOS), and how to use these after each upgrade.

Warehouse retailers: They need an LMS to train employees about important processes such as stock management (i.e., checking inventory and restocking), cash office procedures and safety compliance. They would primarily require LMS features such as compliance management, course management, and course catalog.

Benefits of Retail LMS Software

Retail LMS software helps businesses improve their customer service. Other benefits of this software include the following:

Lower training costs: Reduce the amount of money and time spent on hosting training events, which need instructors, logistical details, food arrangements and more. LMS tools are instructor-independent and allow learners to access the training at any time and any location. Also, once a course has been created, it can be used as many times as you want at minimal cost.

Compliance with regulatory changes: Every year, there are some modifications in the state and federal laws, sales tax and trade policies that affect your business operations. Retail LMS software can help you stay updated with these regulatory changes so that you avoid penalties or potential legal issues.

Market Trends to Understand

Ensure that the retail LMS software vendor you choose keeps up with the recent market trends and is actively developing features to stay up-to-date. Here are some important trends that affect the retail LMS software market:

Gamification will enhance employee engagement: TalentLMS found that 85 percent of employees will spend more time on gamified software, as it would make them more productive. Retail businesses are using gamification to develop courses for sales executives on the latest product offerings, features, and benefits to encourage them to learn faster. Leverage this trend and gamify your LMS to increase learner engagement, efficiency, and ultimately, reduce employee turnover.

Social learning to increase employee collaboration: Social media usage in the workplace is rapidly increasing. Employees are sharing their test results, posting course updates and discussing training topics on social media or the intranet. Social media helps them solve problems together, share insights on common topics and foster friendly competition. Many vendors now offer social learning feature in their LMS.

Mobile learning to aid knowledge retention: The mobile learning market will be worth $37.60 billion by 2020; many vendors are tapping into this opportunity to offer bite-sized courses. These short courses help learners absorb critical information faster, when compared with hour/day-long training sessions. It avoids cognitive overload and allows for long-term knowledge retention.