Microsoft Teams will soon add new features to assist retail store workers

Microsoft Teams continues to add new features to its business customers. Today, ahead of the annual National Retail Federation conference from January 14-16 in New York City, Microsoft outlines some new Teams features that are going to be added specifically for frontline retail store workers.

In a blog post. Microsoft stated that starting in March 2024, retail store owners and managers will be able to use Teams to send specific messages and communicate with store employees based on their location, department, and jobs. Those announcements will then show up on the employees' Team home screen.

Another new retail store feature that will launch as a public preview in February 2024 will help create automatic tags for workers. Microsoft states:

Tags for department and job roles can be configured and created automatically for your frontline workers in the Teams Admin Center. Frontline employees can leverage these automatic tags in their frontline teams to connect with the right person every time.

Employee Q&A chats that occur in Viva Engage with Teams will be added to Teamscommunities sometime later in January so employees can quickly access the info they need from those chats.

In December, Microsoft announced it would add a feature to the Shifts app in Teams in the near future that would allow employees to set specific dates on when they will be available to work, along with their recurring work dates. Today, Microsoft announced that the new feature will become generally available later in January.

Microsoft announced another Shifts app feature that's currently in a public preview:

Admins can also identify schedule owners and create scheduling groups uniformly for all frontline teams at the tenant level and create schedule groups and time-off reasons that will be set uniformly across all frontline teams. Your frontline managers are able to start using Shifts straight out-of-the-box with minimal setup required.

The feature is scheduled to become generally available sometime in March 2024. You can find out more about Microsoft' current and future plans for Teams in the retail store sector in the blog post.