3 Tips For Training New Employees For Your Retail Business

Running a retail business is never easy. Whether you’re operating a brick and mortar location that sells clothing or have an online gun store, it’s wise to bring on employees that are properly trained in how to move your merchandise as well as interact with your customers or clients. Especially during the current economic times, you really can’t afford to lose sales due to poor training of your employees.

To help ensure that your business thrives, here are three tips for training new employees for your retail business. 

Go Through Thorough Onboarding Processes

As soon as you bring a new employee onto your retail team, they should start by going through a thorough onboarding process.

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According to Alexandra Sheehan, a contributor to Medium.com, it’s going to be easiest for you or whoever is doing the training to work from a master checklist of things that need to happen or be taught during the onboarding process for every new employee. On this list, you’ll likely want to include things that every employee should know how to do or will be required to do on a regular basis. Once each process has been taught, you and your new employee can then sign off on the skill that’s been learned so that you both know that expectations for education and training have been met. 

Learn Through Role Playing

If you’re hiring someone who doesn’t have much retail experience, helping them become comfortable interacting with customers or clients should be a big part of the training you do. 

To help you with this type of training, Annie Pilon, a contributor to Small Business Trends, recommends that you try role playing. With you as the customer, present a couple different scenarios that your employee is likely to encounter as they work. You can run through all types of situations, like trying to make a sale, answering questions that you may not be sure about, finding a product, or dealing with someone who’s upset or angry. By learning these skills before they actually happen, you’ll be giving your employee a lot more confidence once the training is over. 

Meet Often For Additional Training

Despite how much training you may have done right after you hired your employees, things can change or be forgotten over time. Knowing this, it’s a good idea to meet often with your employees to do additional training. 

In this training, F. John Reh, a contributor to The Balance Careers, advises that you really listen to what your employees share that they need more training on. Additionally, you should ask customers or clients if there are areas where you employees could improve.

If you’re wanting to see improvement in your customer service for your retail business, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you get positive results through training your employees.