How your L&D team can conduct a successful store visit in retail
Working in learning and development (L & D) within the retail sector requires you to develop training programmes that employees engage with, whilst also ensuring that you’re getting real tangible results. The pressure to prove ROI has never been greater and this can make an L&D manager’s job incredibly stressful.
One of the biggest challenges is prioritising the training that will result in real, demonstrable, and positive change. Because you can have the best training programme in the world, but if it’s not affecting the bottom line of the business, your boss is not going to be impressed.
Store visits can be the perfect way to assess what behaviours are working to drive sales in-store and which aren’t.
What is a store visit?
A store visit is when a manager reviews a store’s performance or compliance in person. They are also commonly referred to as a site visit, retail audit or site audit. When an L&D professional conducts a store visit it is to help them assess whether their training is having any noticeable effects in the ‘real world’.
This is because all too often, learning and development teams create their programmes in head office with no real understanding of how the training affects the behaviours on the shop floor. This can cause a large knowledge gap between what the learning teams think is working to achieve results vs what is actually working.
What should an L&D store visit cover?
This really depends on what your training goals are but let’s say you’re training your retail staff to make more sales. You’ll want to check that they are doing everything necessary to persuade their customers to buy. This may include;
Making the customer feel welcome
Asking the customer's name
Telling the customer their name
Offering them a seat
Explaining your products and services
Offering upsells where possible
Listening attentively to the customer
To keep the structure of your store visits consistent with every L&D manager, it’s essential that you give them the same questionnaire to use. Every questionnaire should be aligned with the purpose of your training.
If you don’t, their time could be wasted in areas that aren’t important for your evaluation.
How can I easily make all store visits consistent?
To easily make your L&D store visits consistent and successful we recommended using a digital store visits app. They let you set questions and managers can access them from anywhere at any time on their mobile or tablet device.
To answer the questions, users have the option to select ‘Yes/No’, use a sliding vibe scale or write a descriptive answer. During their report, they can add photos or set training tasks for employees. Every answer builds up a scored visit audit report. This makes it easy to see areas of strength and weakness.
Because these store visit forms are so quick and easy to fill out, L & D managers can complete them in a matter of minutes and the more data you collect the more insights you’ll discover.
How does an L&D professional conduct a successful store visit?
Look at what you want to achieve from your current training and map your store visit questionnaire to this
For you to really know what you’re looking for, it’s essential that you go back to your training programme. Write down all the correct answers to the questions that you set out in your training and use these to form the basis of your store visit questionnaire. For example, your questions may ask:
Training question: When should you offer your customer an upsell? The answer - at the till.
Store visit question: Are all employees offering upsells at the till?
Training question: What is the maximum amount of time a customer should wait before they are greeted? The answer - 1 minute.
Store visit question: Are any customers having to wait over 1 minute before they are greeted?
Training question: When should you offer an alternative product? The answer - when the one they want isn’t in stock.
Store visit question: Are all employees offering alternative items if the one a customer wants isn’t in stock?
You get the idea, once you’ve compiled all of your questions it should look like the form below:
2. Make sure your store visits are unannounced
To get a true representation of how your sales team is performing it’s essential that you show up unannounced. Walk through the store and observe the behaviour of your team but don’t let everyone make a fuss that you’re there. You want to see how they would behave and treat customers on a daily basis, not on special occasions.
3. Take notes and set tasks as you go
Carrying out a store audit can be hard work, especially when you have customers interrupting you and your team. To ensure you don’t forget anything, make sure to take notes and set tasks as you go.
Our store visit app makes it easy to do this by allowing you to write notes and take photos during your audit. You can even close and reopen the app and all of your changes will be saved.
To help keep on top of what your staff need to do you can set tasks as you can go and these will be sent directly to the employees. These could include things like ‘redo your upselling training’ or ‘be sure to offer additional products at the till’.
Having everything in one place makes it easy for you to work more efficiently and effectively. This will lead to better results and everyone will be clearer on what they need to do and when.
4. Post-visit, create a detailed report which highlights the store’s strengths and weaknesses
For your business to really understand where they are failing to meet expectations, they need to see proof. Learning and development teams struggle to implement change because they find it difficult to prove their training’s effectiveness. By clearly linking your training to shop floor behaviours, you can easily highlight what impact you’re having on your business’s sales figures.
After you‘ve completed your audit, you need to create a report which details the actions of individual employees and that of the overall store. This is going to be a struggle to do manually which is where a store visit app can help.
After each audit, the app automatically generates an insight-rich report which gives you detailed feedback on where the store is struggling and succeeding. It will also do this for individual employee observations so you can easily pinpoint which behaviours are preventing your stores from reaching their sales targets.
What’s even better, is that the app will generate an overarching report which takes the data from all of the store audits. This gives you a clear picture of how your stores are performing overall.
So for example, you may notice that all the stores in Sussex aren’t offering upsells and it has a direct link to their sales numbers. Or perhaps the stores in London are failing to handle their queue times appropriately which is negatively affecting your customer service ratings.
5. Use the data to tweak and tailor your training
Now you know where the bottlenecks are in your business, it’s time to rectify them. Use the data you have to modify your training and tailor it to the needs of your employees.
If you notice that the majority of staff aren’t following the customer journey steps it’s time to refresh and reinforce your customer experience training.
If you want to get really specific, drill down into your individual employee reports and discover exactly what areas they are struggling in. Modify your training programmes to match their missing skill sets and send them to complete before your next store visit.
When you work as an L&D professional, carrying out store visits shouldn’t be an optional task. It should be a mandatory necessity because it allows you to shape your training according to what's going to have the biggest impact. It takes the guesswork out and makes it easy for you to prioritise employee learning which makes a difference to the performance of the company.
Get help with your store visits and achieve maximum results
If you want help with your L&D store visits, book a demo so you can see our store visit app in action. It’s trusted by many well-known retailers including Victoria’s Secret, Next, Tesco Mobile and Virgin Media - 02. They’ve all had huge success with the platform and you can too.
