Significance Of Diversity Training In The Retail Sector
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Table of Contents
R Maya Angelou
It’s a challenging environment for the retail sector, as shops are replaced by online stores, product experience is replaced by online trials, thus revolutionizing the retail scenario like never before!
However, the catch is to use strategies that can drive a large customer base back to the physical stores. And how do we achieve that? Let’s find out.
Once customers are in the brick-and-mortar stores, there is a benefitting virtue that online retail can never provide — a conversational experience. Superior customer experience is highly inevitable to retain and grow the customer base.
To achieve the best customer experience, employees must be aware of and implement customer-friendly services. However, the hurdle for most of the retail stores is to train employees on a uniform code of conduct to deal with a diversified customer base. Customers must be treated with extra caution and personalized responses to make them feel comfortable.
A recent example that created a stir is Sephora shutting down all their stores in the US for an hour because they were accused of racial profiling by a renowned artist. Sephora announced conducting diversity training for 16,000 employees to implement inclusivity at the workplace. The fact that they had to shut all their stores to deliver inclusion training itself shows the gravity of how one incident that is uncalled for can incur huge losses in monetary terms as well as brand value.
Unaware responses can have direct repercussions on the brand identity and lose out on existing as well as potential customers.
Employee’s response to a customer’s question depends on what employees think, their cultural background, and beliefs. Responses can be highly relative, subjective, and differ from person to person.
Additionally, bad customer experiences have numerous repercussions today, with a snowball effect of ugly reviews spreading at the speed of lightning due to social media. However, how can we define a common code of conduct for a large diverse set of buyers and achieve uniformity in response to deal with varied customers? Are we doing enough to train our employees?
What is diversity training or inclusion training?
Diversity training or inclusion training makes employees aware of diversity issues in the workplace to reduce discrimination and prejudice during interactions. It enables to understand the significance of their responses to a diversified customer base and how it can impact customer experience. Inclusion training educates employees on how to work together effectively beyond differences in race, caste, and culture.
In 2014, Barneys New York agreed to pay $525,000 in costs, fees, and penalties after a full nine-month investigation by the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneidermann found that the store profiled customers by race.
Why is diversity training important in the retail sector?
Retail stores must up their game to provide personalized customer experience and invite more customers into the stores. Online stores have their own set of perks such as shopping on the go without having to visit a store. However, retail stores have one virtue that can never be replaced—an impactful customer experience.
You might think that biases are a passé, but we still have a long way to go. This demands a moral code of conduct.
A diversity-friendly space essentially results in better customer interaction, as a result inculcating inclusivity, and in turn, increasing the sales. Every customer is important! A simple testimony of a happy customer is to ensure that customers smile while leaving the store.
Employees need to understand the value of interacting with people from a different religion, culture, race, gender, belief, experience, and ideas. Diversity or inclusion training helps them understand concepts such as sensitivity, unconscious bias, and civic sense to be able to interact effectively.
Inclusion training in the workplace enables us to create awareness around differential lifestyles and ethnicities, and how our conditioned behaviors or reactions may involuntarily be derogatory for someone.
How can eLearning/custom eLearning deliver the right diversity training?
eLearning plays an important role to deliver the right diversity training. However, how can the content be receptive enough to understand significance of diversity or inclusion? How can employees understand ways to tackle a diversified customer base?
Here are some tactics that can be used to convey an impact diversity training:
Simulation-Based Learning
Simulation-based learning creates a real-life situation likely to happen in the workplace. It enables employees to understand potential situations and how they should respond in such situations. Feedback plays an important role in simulations so make sure remedial feedback is provided. Simulation-based learning proves to be a safe environment where mistakes can be corrected without any real consequences.
Scenario-Based Learning
Scenario-based learning helps employees relate to real-life situations while also witnessing the consequences that come with certain responses. This is a highly immersive approach that keeps learners engaged and adds interactivity by posing decision-making and problem-solving scenarios. They understand the consequences of their responses in a safe practice zone. This approach fosters better decision-making which helps employees gain confidence when exposed to a similar real-life situation.
Highly Interactive and Self-Paced
Giving your learners an active experience versus a passive inflow of information ensures better retention. Ensure that the eLearning is in bite-sized courses which makes it highly consumable for learners. You don’t want to push information without allowing your learners to choose the pace at which they absorb it.
Knowledge Checks
The training needs to be interspersed with knowledge checkpoints. This will ensure that the learning objectives you have set at the beginning of your training are met. Don’t just leave these assessments to the end of the course. The idea is to help learners evaluate where they are in terms of their training. Ensure that knowledge checks are inserted throughout the course to gauge the learner’s understanding from time to time.
Conclusion
In a world of online reviews and purchases, coupon codes and size charts, retail stores are experiencing a downfall. Retails stores must hold on to the human element of ‘customer interaction’. Effective customer interaction can retain customers and more importantly make them feel valued!
We at eNyota, truly believe that workplace inclusion is one of the strongest values and the fact that every individual is unique. Talk to our team of experts to know how we can help your organization create and implement successful diversity training courses that are effective and impactful.