Microsoft Teams accelerates, broadens support for frontline workers

With a decades-long history of helping businesses empower frontline workers, WM Reply has strategically used Microsoft Teams to accelerate and broaden delivery of solutions targeted at this critical segment of the workforce. “The evolution of Microsoft Teams gives us a solid offering for frontline worker industries, whether that is enabling built-in functionality or building upon the capabilities of Teams to create the custom experiences that organizations need,” said Charlene Cottle, Business Unit Manager for Retail and Travel at WM Reply.

The WM Reply frontline worker services portfolio includes Teams implementation, bespoke app customization, and packaged IP solutions like its Frontline Digest, along with a strong focus on adoption and change management strategy. “With frontline workers, you don’t have a captive audience for ensuring usage, so we have designed a fail-fast pilot approach to adoption. We gather findings very quickly and determine what is working, what needs to be adjusted, and through what channels,” said Cottle. “It needs to be creative and engaging, because these workers are not sitting behind a desk all day able to go through long training videos. We build an adoption plan around what works really quickly before we go into a wider scale rollout.”

Replacing WhatsApp provides visibility, work/life balance at Co-op

Retail is one sector where WM Reply is seeing huge growth for frontline solutions. For the past six years, WM Reply has been working with Co-operative Group Limited (Co-op), a British consumer co-operative with a group of retail businesses, including grocery retail and wholesale, legal services, funerals and insurance, and social enterprise. After an initial engagement to deploy Microsoft 365 across central support office roles, WM Reply had the opportunity to help the funeral services division of Co-op to implement Teams. Experiencing the benefits of online meetings and collaboration with this group, Co-op wanted to explore the business case for using Teams to empower frontline workers across more than 2,300 stores in its grocery retail business.

“We worked with Co-op to identify the problem statements that were most critical to address, then determined what Teams functionality could be used to alleviate those issues,” said Cottle. At the top of the list was eliminating reliance on WhatsApp for company communications. With WhatsApp, Co-op had no visibility into the communications that managers were sending to frontline employees, and employees had no way to separate their work messages from their personal WhatsApp communications. Making the move to Teams would ensure Co-op colleagues had the ability to access the information and people they needed to, when they wanted to, without interfering with their personal communications.

WM Reply worked with Co-op on a 12-week pilot to implement Teams as a single communications hub for employees, including Company Communicator and Viva Connections to create a central interface for company information. The solution included having employees install the Teams, Microsoft Authenticator, and Microsoft Edge apps on their personal devices. Champions were identified in each area to help onboard workers and manage escalations of technical issues. The pilot ran in five stores and associated depots to ensure feedback from a diverse mix of people and locations.

Creative, iterative approach drives adoption success

The pilot was successful in demonstrating the potential for Teams to help workers increase productivity and better connect employees to information. After approval was given to roll out the solution across all 34,600 frontline workers, adoption became a core focus for Co-op and WM Reply. WM Reply was tasked with creating compelling, bite-sized videos, GIFs, and other supporting content to encourage usage, highlighting the personal advantages of the Teams solution. Content focused on improved work/life balance by keeping work and personal messaging separate and providing one single location to access all job-related information. “We know our business and we can draw on that depth of understanding to create the right messages to support adoption, but WM Reply was invaluable in putting that together in a creative way to catch our employees’ attention and encourage action,” said Josh Power, Adoption Specialist at Co-op. “We push out one short video a week – no longer than 1.5 minutes – showing how simple Teams is to use, no in-depth training required.” When it came to adoption at the depots, WM Reply added “boots on the ground” tactics to accommodate drivers who were only available on site for a few minutes before getting into a vehicle to start their deliveries.

In the first year since deploying the solution in production, Co-op has onboarded 69 percent of in-store workers and 88 percent of team leaders across all regions. Rollout at depots started several months later, and currently warehouse staff are on track for 60 percent adoption by the end of the year, with transport on track for 40 percent adoption. “We carried out a survey and channel audit and there has been an overwhelmingly positive response to Teams,” said Cottle. “People really like the fact that they can access the things they need and communicate with the people they want to on their own devices.” Co-op and WM Reply are already gathering feedback to help shape future innovations to continue supporting workers, such as helping staff apply for holiday time off, request uniforms, and submit for shift swaps. “Co-op has a great foundation now and is taking an iterative approach to continuing to build on the value of Teams to achieve even more impact over time,” said Cottle.

Added practice innovation with Copilot

WM Reply sees generative AI driving transformation at a much faster rate than anything previously introduced in the frontline worker space. It is also a technology that can uniquely address one of the most challenging problems in frontline work – turnover. “One of the most difficult things with high turnover jobs is getting new workers familiar with products and services. Microsoft 365 Copilot can pull specific product data for a floor worker very quickly so that they can assist customers immediately rather than looking for a more experienced colleague,” said Cottle.

WM Reply is already exploring how it can also use Copilot Studio to create custom copilots to close information gaps in frontline worker scenarios. One example is in the aviation industry, enabling cabin crews with a copilot that will allow them to answer questions from passengers before landing or providing ground crews the ability to use a copilot that can turn a picture of a vehicle issue into a fix plan and assign that work to the correct engineer for fast resolution. “New innovations from Microsoft in this area, such as the new Copilot Studio autonomous agents, will only make it easier to deliver more value-add to our frontline worker customers,” concluded Cottle.

"Microsoft Teams gives us a solid offering for frontline worker industries, whether that is enabling built-in functionality or building upon the capabilities of Teams to create the custom experiences that organizations need."

— Charlene Cottle, Business Unit Manager for Retail and Travel, WM Reply

"There has been an overwhelmingly positive response to Teams. People really like the fact that they can access the things they need and communicate with the people they want to on their own devices."

— Charlene Cottle, Business Unit Manager for Retail and Travel, WM Reply

WM Reply helps Co-op transform frontline worker experiences