In this digital day and age, full of e-commerce mega-companies, brick-and-mortar retail businesses must adapt quickly to keep their footing. The distinguishing characteristic that genuinely adds value to a high street retail business is its employees.
Employees are often the reason customers prefer shopping at your store rather than enjoying the ease of buying online. Conversely, your employees may also be the reason customers never want to shop at your store again.
In a recent survey, the Business Roundtable found that 59% of businesses had a hard time finding and retaining employees with fundamental math skills. The gap in math proficiency leads to under-skilled workers, and this can have significant consequences for a business in the highly competitive retail industry.
To maximize your business’s customer service success, it is imperative that your cashiers have the personality traits and competencies that will keep customers coming back for more.
Determining whether or not your organization has qualified employees is the key to optimized productivity and increased profitability. For brick-and-mortar retailers to compete with the ever-evolving online retailers’ quick checkout, they must have skilled cashiers with customer-focused attitudes to keep the revenue stream flowing. Not surprisingly, numeracy is an essential skill to measure for when evaluating cashiers—yet many employees have a limited ability to use basic math, or are unable to understand and use numbers effectively.
With the unemployment rate at a historic low (3.6%), according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, it is critical to retain skilled employees. Screening existing cashiers enables you to assess the skills and competencies necessary to succeed in this role and accurately identify employees who need additional training. Cashier assessment tests prevent the overtraining of already skilled staff and bring those with skill gaps up to speed, increasing employee retention, and overall profitability. Ensure your cashiers have the required skills and aptitude to perform their job successfully. eSkill’s cashier skills tests allow organizations to quickly and effectively determine if existing employees are the right fit, and ultimately improve customer service.
To be an effective cashier, employees must engage in tasks that require working with and understanding numbers. It is easy to understand why strong math skills are essential for everything a cashier does, from counting proper change to monitoring cash limits, calculating total payments received during a period, and reconciling total sales. eSkill’s cashier skills assessments provide quantitative data for employers by reliably and validly assessing the ability to perform these tasks, as well as basic arithmetic. eSkill’s cashier skills assessments allow retailers to ensure that their cashiers have the hard skills necessary to perform their job quickly and accurately, enabling them to compete with the fast and effortless online checkout experience.
Every aspect of the customer experience is impacted by employee behavior because every position is about serving the customer. By measuring the behavioral characteristics as well as the proficiencies that are necessary for quality customer service, eSkill’s customer service assessments help you pinpoint employees who can benefit from specific training sessions. Since word-of-mouth is still one of the best methods of advertisement, and keeping customers is easier than finding new ones, and assessments that measure cashiers’ interpersonal skills are a crucial component of thriving brick-and-mortar retailers.
Excellent interpersonal communication, including professional telephone etiquette, friendliness, and assertiveness are necessary to excel in the customer-centric role of cashier. Cashiers must be able to listen to customers and be responsive to their needs. Cashiers also need to have the basic ability to reason and provide a systematic solution to a given problem as the role involves resolving customer complaints, guiding the customer, and providing relevant product information.
There is real, measurable value in assessing cashiers’ emotional intelligence. Soft skills needed to be in customer service can all be measured using eSkill’s cashier assessment tests. These assessments evaluate the personality traits that can mean the difference between a happy repeat customer and a customer lost.
With eSkill’s easy to use platform, it is simple to combine multiple skills into a single test to create an effective assessment. If your organization has processes and procedures that are unique to your operation, additional questions can be added to any assessment quickly and easily. Customize relevant skills tests for any job requirement or training objective. eSkill’s 24/7 customer support is available to you and your employees, making the assessment process simple.
With a small pool of available job candidates given the current unemployment rate, it is vital that brick-and-mortar retailers utilize cashier skills assessments to remain competitive against the booming e-commerce industry. When used regularly, these assessments provide critical insight that will help employees hone their skills to serve customers better, ultimately increasing productivity and the profitability of your business.
Learn more about the many benefits of using eSkill’s assessments to ensure your business has qualified cashiers when you need them.
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