EdApp by SafetyCulture

FMCG industries & Consumer Goods Training

Published

September 16, 2019

Author

Share

Microlearning for the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCS) Industry

The modern-day employee faces a daunting task. It is in retail where the overload is most stark and it is not without reason. Employees need to be on their toes to provide the best experience to their customers. Training employees to improve service quality and at the same time comply with all the standards is not an easy task.

Employees face several challenges:

  • Most of the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) workforce is engaged in 24X7 customer support. This provides them with very little free time for training.
  • Customer-facing employees are expected to know general information about hundreds of products that they deal with every day.
  • FMCGs survive in a highly competitive market with low profit per product, which means a limited budget for training employees.
  • Training needs to be continuous, while knowledge should be available at all time and relevant to each employee’s role.

Microlearning for the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCS) Industry

Microlearning provides the perfect answer to this training problem in the retail industry. It provides on-demand training to every employee who needs it, wherever they are, continuously.

Microlearning is not merely the breakdown of classroom-based training manuals into micro-sized nuggets, it is also about offering learners focused and practical information to help them in achieving actionable objectives.

Let’s now look in detail at why microlearning is an ideal solution for the FMCG workforce.

Point-of-Need Learning and Support

The sales team forms the backbone of any industry. Employees in the sales team find it difficult to log onto the company’s Learning Management System (LMS) and complete the 60-minute training module when they are on the move.

Instead, they prefer the smartphone, which is an effective means to access the point-of-need learning for essential information needed to complete the task.

The industry requires physical tasks to be performed on the floor, and microlearning is ideal for demonstrating such activities.

Start Creating and Deploying Consumer Good Training Courses with EdApp LMS

Sign Up Free

No credit card required.

Onboarding of New Employees

Microlearning can help reduce the learning curve of new team members entering an organization by reducing the time spent on onboarding. This, in turn, can help employees be more responsive to the customers.

Safety at the Workplace

Training on workplace safety tends to be lengthy and mundane. As a result, employees often tend to ignore safety manuals on these subjects. This can be addressed if the training content on workplace safety is delivered in digestible, micro-modules or nuggets. This will help employees to refer to these nuggets in case of emergencies. The use of flowcharts, infographics, videos can help knowledge retention among employees.

The use of mobile phones would also enable employees to access the organization’s LMS to view these micro nuggets. These micro nuggets need to ideally be between 3-5 minutes to ensure the content is concise, focused and impactful so that employees can apply the knowledge immediately.

Well-designed nuggets can deliver focused content to help employees master difficult concepts through spaced repetition. Microlearning delivered through mobile devices are ideal for the FMCG industry.

However, mere roll out of training is incomplete without measuring the return on investment.

Some tips to measure ROI:

Revenue from sales
Instead of merely investing in product sales training, it would be prudent to link the learning and development team with the sales and marketing team to produce support training material during the release of a new product. When sales figures increase, one can demonstrate through learning assessment how this affected knowledge and therefore the sales results.

Feedback from learners
One can always use the training feedback using the online portal to obtain learner feedback. This makes it easier to gather and analyze the data.

Employee engagement
It is recommended to send an employee engagement survey to understand the level of the employee’s engagement with the organization. An engaged employee will have much to do with the organization’s learning culture. The data from the effectiveness of the training programs rolled out in a specific time can be linked to the increase in employee engagement.

Customer feedback
Some businesses ask customers to fill the feedback form through the customer net promoter. When rolling out a customer service training program, you can use the NPS or Net Promoter Score to assess the results. You can then link in the customer service training program results to the net promoter.

 

If you would like to learn more about how to build the most effective consumer goods training strategy!

If you’d like to know more about how EdApp’s mobile learning platform can help your internal training practices, get in touch at enquiries@edapp.com. You can also try EdApp’s Mobile LMS and authoring tool for free by signing up here.

Author

Guest Author Daniel Brown

Daniel Brown is a senior technical editor and writer that has worked in the education and technology sectors for two decades. Their background experience includes curriculum development and course book creation.