At a time when they are using technology to free workers up for supper interaction, many companies worry that their employee training is insufficient for them to reach their customer experience goals.
The report, entitled ‘Navigating Business Challenges in Retail and Hospitality: Insights and Strategies for 2024’ emerges from a survey of more than 300 retail and hospitality business leaders in the United States.
The survey demonstrated that employee turnover, customer experience and sales are the top three challenges facing retail and hospitality businesses today. Indeed, 66% of retail and hospitality leaders reported that employee turnover and turnover-related fallout is their biggest problem. Staff shortages and retention emerged as a pain point felt by sector leaders, five times greater than any other including loss prevention, no-call no-shows and digital transformation.
Leaders are also concerned about supply and demand, lack of leadership, keeping employees goal-oriented, inflation, cost of goods and labor, employees not retaining information or not caring, and employees being afraid to engage with customers. The survey also found that 92% of retail and hospitality companies still use face-to-face training or desktop-based learning systems. The approach requires time away from customers and may be delivered in a way that lowers engagement, relevance and accessibility, eduMe maintained. Today, 92% still don’t use modern training systems for staff, relying primarily on face-to-face delivery, the company asserted. For more than 50% of retail and hospitality companies, training sessions take more than one day, despite leaders believing that quicker-to-complete training would improve learning outcomes.
Then, 24% of survey respondents thought better accessibility to training would improve the outcome of related initiatives. However, 62% did not currently embed training into human resources systems such as Workday and communications tools such as Microsoft Teams, that they report employees are accessing daily.
Despite the challenges involved, retail and hospitality leaders are committed to upskilling employees, eduMe pointed out, and understand the integral part they play in providing better customer experiences. They acknowledge that employees who go above and beyond have a bigger influence on customer experience than product quality or price.
In announcing the study results eduMe CEO and founder Jacob Waern said, “The retail and hospitality industries are facing a number of challenges, but to see a lack of confidence around customer service and customer experience abilities so keenly felt, especially when 93% of leaders report they are spending considerable time training employees, shows the stark need for a shake up in the methods being used to provide these employees with skills and knowledge. Businesses need to invest in better employee training systems and processes in order to ensure that their frontline teams are equipped to provide the best possible service. We work with a number of companies that have large frontline workforces and the impact they’ve seen when employees have access to information and training on their mobile device, in exciting short forms like ‘TikTok for learning’ as we’ve been described, has been immeasurable in bringing notable improvements in customer service, and importantly, business metrics like retention.”
