As Microsoft Teams see a 280% active user growth in retailer situations, Microsoft adds new updates

In a new blog post, Emma Williams, Corporate Vice President, Modern Workplace Transformations at Microsoft, announced some milestone moments and updates for Microsoft Teams. The Microsoft executive revealed that Teams daily active users in retail grew more than 280 percent, and also revealed the general availability of new features like a Tasks publishing feature, as well as Approvals.

According to Williams, Frontline workers in retail have increased their reliance on the Teams mobile app to perform their jobs. The number of daily active users in Teams for Frontline works has doubled since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March.

Williams also mentioned that retailers have also used Teams to create agile store operations,  contactless shopping experiences, and organization-wide connected communications. Along with those features, and other things like Shifts, the new features which fit in with all that can be seen below.

• A new task publishing feature of Tasks in Teams, will enable store operations teams to coordinate tasks at scale while maintaining the ease of task management in one location
• Expanded statetgic partnership with Blue Yonder which simplifies access to the Blue Yonder Workforce managment system through a new connector for Shifts in Teams
• Partnering with industry-leading workforce management and task management provider Reflexis (now part of Zebra Technologies) to give Microsoft Teams users seamless access to their Task and Scheduling solutions.
• adding Approvals to our Teams tools to keep store operations moving smoothly. Approvals enables a secure, low-friction process for frontline workers to provide faster and better customer service, whether for a written acknowledgment from their manager or for an official signature from a customer.

In addition to the above, Microsoft is also announcing that Azure Active Directory SMS sign-in, My Staff portal, and shared device sign-out for frontline workers is now generally available. You can learn more about these changes, and more, over at the Tech Community.