Good, well-trained employees are imperative for physical retail stores to succeed. Yet, many retailers have not devoted enough attention to their employees.

Recently, Knowledge@Wharton published the article “Want to Stop Retail Showrooming? Start Training Your Staff”:

“It’s obvious that customers will prefer to deal with sales associates who know what they’re talking about when it comes to the products they’re hawking. But what has been less obvious is just how much of a difference knowledgeability makes to the bottom line.”

“To find that answer, Marshall L. Fisher, professor of operations, information and decisions at Wharton, and his colleagues, INSEAD professor Serguei Netessine and then-Wharton doctoral candidate Santiago Galino (who is now a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business), studied data from 63,500 salespeople at 330 stores. The resulting report, titled “Do Online Training Work in Retail? Improving Store Execution through Online Learning,” quantifies the answer by the metric that matters most in retail: sales. In this interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Fisher explains what they learned, and what the implications are for businesses across the board.”