Visited a store recently? Did you have a good experience? If so – and it wasn’t a luxury retailer – how much of a role did a store associate play in that experience? I’m not a betting man, but if I were, my money would be on that you probably opted to figure out your shopping needs by yourself.

As it stands, retailers know that they need to improve the quality of their in-store associates – but this begs the question: exactly how they plan to do it?

According to what they told us in our most recent to store research, their number one opportunity is to educate and empower employees. And their third most identified opportunity? Find new ways to make those employees more productive. They are heading exactly where they need to go.

But some of the most interesting data points don’t emerge until we see how they prioritize their opportunities by the products that they sell. For instance:

• Only 17% of FMCG retailers see self-service customer-facing technologies as a top opportunity. As the one segment of retail where self-service is most embraced by shoppers, this signals that, for the moment at least, grocery retailers have all of the self-scanning technologies that they need. By the time the current generation of self-checkout hardware is in need of refresh, chances are the entire POS technology landscape will have changed dramatically. But for now, they seem content with what they have and will direct their technology budgets elsewhere.
• In a similarly interesting note, hard goods retailers are most eager to educate and empower their store associates with technology; 76% (compared to only 33% of general merchandise retailers) say this is the top opportunity they see for the coming year. This is logical, as shoppers are still more likely to approach store associates with product-specific questions in such an environment than they would in an apparel setting. However, it is somewhat more than that: if hard goods retailers can address customers’ questions/curiosity to provide a truly enhanced customer experience, will this condition shoppers to be more likely to consult store associates in other retail settings, as well? Positive inroads here could actually retrain shoppers to think of store associates as valuable sources of assistance, and may encourage them to engage store staff in the future, instead of simply relying on their own mobile devices for in-store help.

So we know that retailers – particularly the best performing retailers – know the quality and preparedness of their in-store staff has to improve. We’ve also seen a decline in the interest from previous years to stuff stores with self-service technologies, letting the customer figure it out for themselves.

And while these are incredibly positive trends born from this year’s data, fewer points could paint a clearer picture for how and why Retail Winners have started to – and will continue to – outpace their competitors in making stores relevant again: they are willing to invest in their workforce.

And it doesn’t just stop there. Yes, the fact that Winners (and larger retailers, as well) have already begun the long-tail investment in a workforce that will return dividends, they also are starting to recognize the roll that better training plays in that equation. It was only last year when we asked retailers about how many hours they dedicate to training their employees. The answer then was clear. We found that, regardless of job function, no one was getting enough training.

Maybe things are looking up for stores in the coming year?