Your retail staff is vital to the success of your store. After all the advertising and promotion is done, having a well-trained, positive, helpful team on the floor is vital to converting customer foot traffic into sales and profit.

So how do you keep a busy, far-flung workforce trained on your latest techniques, policies and procedures? You use online training with mobile access. Everyone has a mobile device today. From smartphones to tablets, mobile devices are changing the way employees and consumers get information and entertainment. Here are three reasons you should think mobile when training retail staff.

1. Mobile Training Is Consistent

Online training with mobile access gives you the ability to instantly offer the same training to every employee around the globe. With the same training applied worldwide, you can develop a consistent brand story, so customers have the same wonderful experience no matter where they interact with your employees.

Consistent training boosts employee confidence, increases performance, generates more revenue, saves money and increases productivity. Employees need to be aware of the current procedures and expectations you have put in place. With the speed of business today, your methods will change rapidly to respond to market changes. Mobile helps you deliver a consistent message across time zones and cultures.

2. Mobile Training Is Convenient

Remember the giant binders that companies used to hand out when they initiated a new training course? That’s the way the NFL and other professional sports used to do it — every play was in a big three-ring binder. Those binders are fading away as teams such as the Baltimore Ravens and Tampa Bay Buccaneers provide players with mobile devices like iPads.

Working on mobile devices is becoming the standard. A research study conducted by eLearning Guild found that more than two-thirds of Americans already use their mobile device for various work purposes. And the vast majority of respondents said they are aware that employees use their own devices at work. Think about your own phone — it’s probably close by. Mobile training is convenient for workers because their devices are with them much of the day.

3. Mobile Training Is Fast

It wasn’t too long ago that accessing video on your mobile device was slow and cumbersome. Not only that, but it ate up your data plan in a hurry. Now Wi-Fi is available everywhere — coffee shops, retail stores and just about every McDonald’s you walk into. And it is faster every year; in 1999, the average speed was 54Mbps (megabits per second).

By 2009, this speed had increased to 450Mbps. And by 2012, the average Wi-Fi speed had reached 1.3Gbps. Ubiquitous and fast Wi-Fi means learners can access video, graphics, rich media, and interactive elements easier than ever before, which gives you a full palette of training options.

Smart Retailers Go Mobile

By the time revelers counted down to zero on New Year’s Eve of 2013, there were more mobile devices around the world than people on the face of the Earth. In 2016, internet access through mobile devices surpassed desktop access for the first time, and this trend has only accelerated. Smart retailers are taking a mobile-first approach to staff training to keep pace with fast-changing consumer behavior centered around technology.

Litmos is on the forefront of mobile training for retail. Over four million happy users in small companies and large enterprises alike use Litmos to design and deliver training courses to their local and international workforce.