Internationalisation of Retail Businesses: the Importance of Training

The exponential growth of Asian markets has led many international brands to expand their retail presence in this region over the last few years.

Nonetheless, as international retail has become very competitive and sophisticated, it is important that retailers properly prepare and implement an appropriate strategy before venturing in foreign markets. Hence the need to have a distinct brand, a story to tell, and know-how that distinguishes the business from others, all elements that need to be properly communicated to the consumers.

At the Texere Retail Conference 2019 Paolo Selva, CEO of Boggi Milano, underlined the importance of service standardisation across sales outlets as a key competitive advantage (read the full report here). In Asia for instance  consumers have very high expectations when it comes to customer service and in-store experience. For this reason, retail staff training is so crucial for the success of a brand.

Frette - a case study

The lock-down has deeply affected retail, but at least has given the opportunity to many brands to rethink certain aspects of the retail business and take advantage of the closure of stores to finetune certain training tools and retrain the retail staff.

At Frette Asia we have developed a brand-new training manual for the retail staff by collecting in a structured way the know-how of its people and organising it into a comprehensive training manual, a new tool that will now be used by the Frette team to do training across the region to distributors and their retail staff.

The training manual reflects the need to transfer to the retail staff, and therefore to the end consumer, a full Frette experience, ranging from the brand history and heritage to the characteristics of the raw materials, the main features of each fabric, the signature finishes, the product care instructions, and eventually also the store maintenance guidelines.

Training sales staff

After the completion of the training manual,  daily skype tutoring sessions have been organised for the sales staff, as well as role-play exercises, to practice storytelling, their knowledge of the different products and collections as well as sales techniques.

The key learnings of this period are that there is always room for improvement and a temporary store closure can be an opportunity to improve the customer experience for the reopening and ensure top-quality service.

Brand expansion into strategic markets is not trivial and requires a lot of investment in terms of time to ensure successful sales conversion. If you are considering expanding your business, get in touch with us today for a free consultation via pr@texereadvisors.com