Training during the COVID-19 crisis

In the summer of 2018, when I founded DynaLux, the vision was to focus on capturing and analyzing the data of the retail traffic audience. The idea was relatively simple: out of every ten people who visit a store, a minority would make a transaction and a majority won’t. By understanding who the majority was, we believe that retailers and brands alike will be able to identify the shortcomings in their operations and – once identify – address them in order to improve conversion rates with existing audiences. Therefore, it was important for us to offer Consulting and Training solutions for our clients, so they can address the issues once they have been properly identified through our Retail Audience Measurement app.

And so, from Day 1 of DynaLux’s existence, training and consulting were the second and third legs on which I was hoping to build a sustainable company with a genuine and original approach to service the luxury retail industry.

Pretty much like every other company in the retail sector, the unforeseen arrival of the COVID-19 crisis has shaken us to the core. Our clients were obliged to close their physical retail operations, bringing the data capture to a complete halt. Social distancing made traditional training sessions an impossible pitch and Consulting missions came to a halt as all our clients and prospects had to freeze and reduce their spending budgets drastically to ensure job security for their staff and – for some of them – fight for their survival. So, what is a start-up to do?

Pivot

Indeed, since the second half of February, we have started noticing an important change in the behavior of the retail audiences of our clients. While we can’t say that we did expect a complete lockdown to come into play, we knew that if the audience levels kept decreasing, and with them, the sales, it was only a matter of time before our clients would start asking for the Data collection service to be halted.

This sudden drop meant that a lot of retail staff started working a smaller number of hours and they, therefore, had more time on their hands. We figured that one of the best ways to take advantage of this reduced activity was to pitch our clients the project of focusing more on training and coaching. Sure enough, several of our clients were receptive to that idea and we started moving forward with the various training projects.

Lockdown

As early as the first week of March, we started noticing that there was a gearing up towards a complete lockdown. We received confirmation that schools were not going to re-open until September. We started hearing about Malls planning a complete shutdown and that the government was considering strict confinement for the whole population. How are we to provide training to our clients if we can’t be in the same room as them.

Zoom and MS Teams

Visio conference tools such as Zoom and Microsoft teams have come to the rescue. While in the UAE we have faced historical bans on tools such as Skype or Facetime, it was welcome news that Zoom and Microsoft Teams were operational. This has allowed thousands of companies to keep working while respecting the Social Distancing rules. Sure enough, we jumped on this wagon and decided to use the same tools to provide our training services to our clients. What we did not foresee was how that was going to impact the way we deliver said training.

The “Zoom” training session

Throughout my career, and in the various positions I have held in the past, I had numerous opportunities to be a trainer. I have been performing training sessions to retail staff for over 15 years and – up until March 2020 – I have always done so in a room with the trainees being with me. I have often heard that human communication is non-verbal at least 60% of the time but I never truly believed it. That is until I had to perform my first “Zoom” training session on the 5th of April 2020. I was alone in a room, in front of my computer, and, on the other side, I had an audience of over 40 highly trained retail professionals watching my presentation. I have felt completely blind. I could not create a visual connection to any of the people I was talking to. As I was going through the PowerPoint presentation, explaining the content of a slide, I had absolutely no way whatsoever to know if people were watching, listening, or just ignoring me. I did do my best to try and get them involved, but it was a very challenging exercise.

The way Zoom works – I have to admit – is quite good. And between Zoom and MS Teams, I have to say that the former is, in my opinion, better suited for a live training session. Participants can “Raise their hand”, allowing to avoid the cacophony of several people speaking at the same time. The presenter can mute/unmute people of his choice, and screens can be shared. These are some of the most basic features, but I could definitely see that there is an opportunity for such companies to create a specific version specially designed for training purposes.

The “traditional” training method

Throughout my career, all training that I was involved in, either as a trainer or a trainee, worked on the same principle: One person has the knowledge and that person will present/share/transmit said knowledge to the audience via speech with visual aids. Sometimes, the trainer/coach will even ask the participants to be somewhat physically active at some point or other during the session. I have come to realize that in today’s reality, this will not be the most effective way to transmit the information, as the trainer is impaired by the distance between him/her and the audience.

The DynaLux training method

After having spent most of April delivering online training via Zoom and MS Teams, we have learned a lot and we were able to finally find an interesting, new way to deliver training to our retail clients. While our methodology will not be as good as IRL (in real life) sessions, it certainly does yield better results and an improved engagement from the audience as we have been seeing since we started implementing it early may.

In order to create these two methods, we have considered three key elements of the human psyche:

Efforts = Retention

Playing = Focus

Competition = Surpassing

A-  An Effort will imply Retention

You might have seen/heard this before: If it is free, people won’t care. This, of course, is not an absolute truth. Yet, we can argue that when people pay for a service or a product, they are more likely to hold on to it. Take the small toys that McDonald's gifts to all children taking a happy meal. Very few children really hold on to them. As a matter of fact, the fun time of these toys is very likely to be the shortest ever. A toy for which the child had to make efforts (Good grades, cleaning his room, etc…) will certainly be cherished a little more.

Similarly, if – as a trainer – you provide information during a session, it will be received by the audience. No question about it. But if you come back and ask the same audience about that same information a few months down the line, chances are they won’t remember it. And so, the efficiency of this method can be disputed. On the other hand, imagine that instead of “giving” the information, the trainer was to challenge the audience to go and “find” the information. In that instance, the trainees will be investing time, energy, and focus to dig up the correct information. This simple effort will guarantee the retention of the information.

B-   While we Play, our ability to Focus increases

My son has recently gifted the online game “Fortnite”. It is an online Shooter Survival game where the players have to evolve in a world, acquire weapons, ammunitions and shoot other players. The point of the game is to be the last man standing. The first time my son played the game, he was shot dead within 30 seconds. He immediately jumped back into the game and lasted perhaps just above a minute. If it weren’t for his parents trying to control his screen time, he’d be playing 24/7, forgetting to eat, drink or sleep. While he is playing, it is impossible to get his attention.

This experience with my son and his apparent addiction to online gaming has taught me two things: The first, he is learning and acquiring skills while he is playing. Indeed, after what I have calculated to be approximately 50 hours of playtime over the last two months, he now regularly ranks in the top 20 players while he was just 6 weeks ago within the bottom 20. The second thing I have learned is that the fact that he was playing has allowed him to develop the required focus level to acquire these skills.

C-   When we Compete, we Surpass ourselves to win.

The Darwinian theory known as the Survival of the Fittest is, in my opinion, the best way to explain this. Within the DNA of anyone who wants to reach any type of success in life, it is indeed the spirit of competition that drives us to do better and to improve. It is human nature to constantly compare ourselves to others. There can’t be a “More” if there was no “Less”.

It is this basic principle of constant competition that makes students surpass themselves in order to improve their knowledge. When a pre-med student in a class of a 1,000 knows that only the top 100 students will make it to Med School, he knows that he is in a competition and that he must push himself to the limit in order to secure a spot.

Since we now have to deliver our training sessions via Visio Conference, we have started adapting our material on these three guiding principles. While it has only been a few weeks, we notice a great improvement in the level of engagement of our trainees as well as on the efficiency of the method.

Omar Chaoui – Founder & CEO DynaLux

DynaLux Consulting DMCC is a firm established in Dubai and servicing the Luxury Industry. DynaLux has developed a proprietary technology to assist luxury retail stores in understanding in detail the actual audience that visits luxury stores, unlike standard CRM tools that focus only on paying customers. By understanding the complete audience of visitors, DynaLux assists brands and retailers alike to improve their conversion rate by addressing the specific issues that can be noticed thanks to data collection and analysis. For more information, write to [email protected]