Retail businesses should consider using Teams to scale up and secure themselves, says Microsoft

Microsoft just released several new features for Teams for retail services, including enhanced store team communication and collaboration, streamlined store operations, and new ways to secure and manage retail businesses, according to the latest Microsoft Teams blog post.

It should come as no surprise, though. Microsoft updated the default client version for Teams last fall, and the Redmond-based tech giant promised new features would be on the way.

With this being said, Microsoft wants to make the retail business consider Teams as a to-go platform for all things management, and work streamlining, saying:

We’re announcing new solutions designed to enable store teams to efficiently meet customers’ expectations and improve the retail experience in this new era of AI. Keep reading below for the latest product and feature capabilities coming to Teams to help simplify operations and enable first-class retail experiences for all retail workers – including the frontline.

Microsoft

One of the most important features is the ability to secure organizations’ chats on Teams with quick authentication methods. Users will only need to type in the first part of their username, to authenticate faster. The feature is coming to Teams this month.

Since a single device is often shared among multiple frontline workers, they need to sign-in and out multiple times a day throughout a shift or across shifts. Typing out long user names with a domain is prone to mistakes and can be time consuming. With domain-less sign-in, frontline workers can now sign-in to Teams quicker using only the first part of their username (i.e., without the domain), then enter the password to access Teams on shared and corporate-managed devices. For example, if the username is [email protected] or [email protected], users can now sign in with only “123456” or “alland”, respectively. Thiis feature will be in public preview in January 2024. 

Microsoft

What other Teams features are coming to for retail businesses?

• Route announcements to frontline teams by location, department, and role
• Boost frontline teamwork with auto-generated role and department tagging
• Bring answers to communities for easier information sharing
• Monitor how employee engagement drives business performance
• Automatically hear push-to-talk transmissions from multiple channels
• Use any generic wired (USB-C and 3.5mm) headset for instant team communication on Android
• Allow frontline teams to set their shift availability for specific dates
• Easily deploy shifts at scale for your frontline
• Streamline Teams deployment for your frontline and manage at scale
• Map your operational hierarchy to frontline teams
• Leverage generative AI to streamline in-store shift management
• Automate and simplify corporate to store task publishing
• Publish a task that everyone in the team must complete
• Require additional completion requirements for submitting tasks

All these features are set to be released from January to March 2024, and retail businesses will be able to use them to not only protect and secure themselves, but as a tool for scaling up, as well.

Workers, and most importantly, frontline workers will be able to communicate and schedule their work easier, while also keeping in touch with the managerial staff.

You can read more about these new features here.