Boost Black Friday Retail Training to Make This Season Your Best Ever

Since 13% of all retail sales in the United States occur between Black Friday and Christmas, you want to make sure your employees are ready to deliver a profitable customer experience. One way to do this is to use best practices for your Black Friday retail training. 

These methods don’t really require a lot of extra effort, but you do want to boost your regular retail store training to be ready for this extra busy time of year. A little effort will go a long way to boosting your bottomline.

Rely on microlearning

Between responding to customers, restocking products, or taking orders, learning and development is not exactly your employees’ top priority. The best way to engage them with Black Friday retail training is to break content into small, easily digestible chunks, or leverage microlearning. Microlearning content, by nature, is designed for mobile devices and is perfectly suited for the retail frontline employee. Example bit-sized training content can include: 

• Reading the store’s layout/floor plan
• New product information or menu items
• Leveling merchandise
• Performing inventory count

Make training easy to access

One of your top priorities for Black Friday retail training is to make it accessible to employees, no matter where they are. The numbers prove it: the vast majority of the frontline retail workforce are millennials and Gen Z–and both generations spend an average of 3-5 hours a day on their phones.

Mobile learning makes it easy for employees to reference what they need quickly, and get back to the task at hand. And delivering training at the point on the job makes it more memorable.

Dial up interactivity

To really engage frontline workers, retail store training needs to be interactive. Including a variety of different media like video snippets, quizzes, polls, and images amps up the employee’s participation in the learning process. This helps frontline employees feel involved in their own development, and they’ll look forward to completing their training.

Collaborate on content

Textbook learning isn’t useful to your frontline employee. Most retail tasks like restocking shelves or serving are things employees learn by doing them. When you’re creating Black Friday retail training content, collaborate with managers to get the best and most relevant material. This is where you can tap into best practices that can improve performance across the board.

To speed up the content creation process, managers without any technical, coding or design experience should be able to access your content authoring software and easily write, edit, or update content. And when things change, and they always do, you and your team can make revisions to the content and quickly make it available to frontline employees. 

Provide a single source of truth

Training doesn’t mean anything if the content isn’t reliable or useful. With a single source of knowledge and information, your frontline workers will be ready for Black Friday surges. This single source of truth can include anything like SOPs, job aids, checklists, training, and other employee learning development content that’s unique to your business. 

All your training content is easily organized based on operations and can be sorted and favorited for easier access. It’s easy to quickly browse, go to the right place in the content, and grab a quick refresher. Your people can easily find out how to do their work, what procedures have changed, how to sell your products, and how to serve your customers.

With a little bit of effort and planning, you can supercharge training for Black Friday so employees are confident and ready to deliver on your brand promise.