NEW YORK CITY — Sprouts Farmers Market prides itself on its in-store experience, and that includes having a staff that can offer insights and answer questions on the grocer’s unique product assortment.
To ensure that staffers meet these expectations, Sprouts adopted a training method that better ensures information retention and, more importantly, is user-friendly for its associates, a training director for the grocer shared during a Sunday session at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in New York City.
August marked one year since Sprouts launched software company Axonify’s training program chainwide. The program presents “bite-sized” training content for staffers to complete in just a few minutes.
“[The] idea around this [is] daily reinforcement, or daily engaging with a learning management system… through daily questions,” Kyle Eynon, Sprouts’ director of training and development, said during the session. “So what we do is we have our team members, when they come in each and every shift, they spend about three to five minutes answering questions, and there’s a gamification component on the platform as well, which really helps to drive that engagement piece.”
The type of training employees receive is targeted based on their job title, according to Eynon.
Engagement from Sprouts employees on the platform is high, with an approximately 93% to 94% utilization rate, Eynon said. The training platform offers a variety of games that reinforce what previous sessions have already taught, and because employees are focused on the game, their memory recall of the information is higher, he said.
Sprouts’ team members can choose which device they complete their daily training on, according to Eynon. Every Sprouts store is equipped with one training computer that employees can use. Staffers can also select from in-store desktop computers, their Sprouts-issued handheld devices or download the app onto their personal phones.
Eynon noted that despite the Axonify platform not providing end-to-end, or the “rich data,” that is expected from technology partnerships, the insights the training solution give managers are vital to running Sprouts’ stores.
For instance, when employees answer their daily questions, they have the option to rank how confident they are in their answers — a tool that ultimately benefits store managers, Eynon said. If a store or department manager sees one of their workers having high confidence in a wrong answer, they’re able to address it directly. On the flip side, when an employee is inputting correct responses but with low confidence, managers can reassure their team, he said.
“With confidence, I think that’s really powerful when you think about folks in the field. If they lack confidence, the chance of them going and engaging with the customer is very, very low,” Eynon said.
