Leverage Microlearning for Frontline Workers in the Retail Industry

Did you know that over 83% of shoppers believe they’re more knowledgeable than sales associates? This leaves many companies wondering – how can we develop our frontline workers to ensure they deliver an excellent in-store customer experience and drive sales? To answer this question, we need to explore the power of microlearning for training frontline workers in the retail industry.

How Two Retail Organizations Successfully Employed Microlearning for Their Frontline Workers

We are living in an era where the pace of change is the fastest it has ever been. The ever-evolving technology compels businesses to adapt and maintain their competitive advantage while becoming more resilient. This is especially relevant for the retail industry, as it continues to grapple with a high attrition rate.

Some of the top-performing retail companies are maintaining their competitive advantage by implementing microlearning for frontline workers. Here’s an example of a leading pharmacy retail chain, Wellness Forever, that adopted this strategy to promote and provide continuous learning.

Wellness Forever Embraces Microlearning

Founded in 2008, Wellness Forever has more than 200 stores across Maharashtra, Goa, and Karnataka and has 4000+ employees. Let’s look at the challenges that led the company to employ microlearning for frontline workers.

• While they already had an L&D solution in place, multiple factors deterred the effectiveness of the platform. For example, it was time-consuming, expensive, and non-scalable.

• When upskilling and right skilling is the need, the company hasn’t yet adopted a change management and learning culture. 

To combat these challenges, Wellness Forever worked with Disprz to leverage a more effective learning platform and accelerate their time to productivity. With Disprz, Wellness Forever experienced the following:

• Faster onboarding: A 30-day onboarding process and knowledge assimilation, the platform initiated KPI-driven digital learning after the first 30 days

• Personalized learning: AI-driven Microlearning for frontline workers that focused on how to stock medicines, prescribe the right drugs, etc., through bite-sized lessons and flashcards.

• User-generated content: Employees were encouraged to create content for their colleagues to inspire and instill a learning culture. 

Tackling these challenges helped the team achieve these key outcomes & benefits: 

• Reduced in-class training time from 5 days to 2 days per store per month

• More than 80% completion rate across stores

• Faster onboarding – within 30 days

Understanding the employees’ skill gaps and keeping the industry requirements in mind, the retail chain initiated and implemented KPI-driven digital learning for all employees and is now successfully skilling its always-on-the-move workforce.

Chaayos Employs Microlearning to Track the Learning Impact 

According to the Journal of Applied Psychology, microlearning makes the transfer of learning from the classroom to the desk 17% more efficient. So how can organizations track these learning metrics and their impact?

This was one of the most significant challenge faced by Chaayos, a chain of retail stores that sells flavored tea across India. In addition to the lack of mobile or scalable learning platforms to disseminate product knowledge to employees and time-consuming training procedures. 

Here’s how Chaayos leverages microlearning for frontline workers in the flow of work, while reducing the time and costs of training, with the help of Disprz

• A mobile learning platform helps build a personalized progression journey mapped for each employee

• Offering quick access to product knowledge through video-based micro-learning resources

• Real-time analytics tracks progress, enabling trainers to keep track of learning completion through leaderboard scores and metrics (like learning agility score)

Here’s how implementing microlearning helps Chaayos achieve its key outcomes

• On any given day, there are 500 active users (900 users overall) on the learning platform

• Completion ratio of 77%, higher than the industry average

• Ease of assessments and analysis through metrics and scores

Chaayos now offers 1200 personalized chai options. Disprz’ learning and skilling platform facilitated constant learning and upskilling, helping the Chaayos team structure their training programs in a timely and transparent manner, improving retention while keeping track of the direct impact on KPIs and performance.

What does successful microlearning look like in retail?

Microlearning in retail is more than just breaking content into smaller pieces; it requires accessibility and relevance to engage employees during brief downtime effectively.

Microlearning in retail should seamlessly integrate into the learners’ workflow:

• Rule 1: Microlearning must deliver content at the right moment of need to enhance knowledge retention.

• Rule 2: Integrate microlearning into existing apps to ensure accessibility, avoiding additional logins or hardware, for effective learning.

• Rule 3: Recognize that not all topics are suitable for microlearning; some, like compliance training, may require traditional approaches with built-in quizzes.

Effective microlearning ensures learning happens in the moment of need, enhancing knowledge retention and practical application across the retail sector.

Microlearning for Frontline Workers Continues to Provide Benefits for Retail Companies

Just like Wellness Forever, other companies like Amazon and Delhivery have realized the power of microlearning for frontline workers. They have quickly found that this unique learning approach enables them to formulate and validate new strategies and improve the frontline team’s performance.

They personalize the learning pathway and create varied learning experiences with ILT, microlearning, webinars, and Free Web Content (YouTube, etc.)

What makes microlearning an ideal fit for the retail workforce? 

• The learning content is bite-sized and usually shorter than 20 minutes

• Engaging mobile-driven learning modules

• Fast, fresh information discourse; just-in-time learning aids in the field or at the workplace

• Self-paced learning

• Improves retention by nearly 25-60%

• Facilitates feedback and positive reinforcement

• Direct impact on performance

• Competitive advantage