June 30, 2020
A digital workspace that transforms ideas into revenue. Subscribe now to learn more about Microsoft Teams.
Innovative ideas are an organization's greatest asset. Yet these assets need the appropriate space to grow, evolve, and transform into revenue-generating initiatives. Whether digital or physical, today's workplaces need to harness the synergy of everybody involved and empower them to share and collaborate in an environment that fosters productivity. These workplaces also need to adapt to everybody's needs and remain intuitive for the entire team, regardless of age, background, or gender.
Subscribe now to stay current on the latest digital workplace trends, and discover how you can foster inclusion and innovation across your business with the help of Microsoft.
Enable faster, more accurate decision-making for retail managers. Get started with Microsoft Strategic Retail Solutions.
In the digital age, fast, accurate decision-making can make the difference between seizing a unique opportunity and remaining on the sidelines. To create a business that's truly more agile, managers and other decision-makers must be empowered with digital tools that enable them to process tasks more effectively and obtain a holistic view of their customers.
Subscribe now to learn how you can drive intelligent retail and get the most out of your customer- and employee-facing applications by using Microsoft Strategic Retail Solutions.
Schneider Electric | How Microsoft Teams helped create a successful HR marketing campaign
Diversity is a defining characteristic of today's global workforce. With teams working on projects around the world, it's critical to have different perspectives on the work being done to ensure an inclusive final product or service that all users can relate to. To that end, Schneider Electric wanted to create a Human Resources campaign that would bolster its reputation as a company that prides itself on being diverse and recruiting the best talent from around the world. It was only appropriate, then, that during the creation of such an important campaign, the company would include as many voices as possible to ensure an adequate representation of its multi-ethnic workforce.
In this video, you'll learn how Schneider Electric used Microsoft Teams to ensure constant collaboration and provide a digital workspace where ideas could be polished into final concepts. You'll also discover how even complex projects that span multiple teams across various regions can thrive when empowered with the right focus and digital tools.
Empowering managers
Retail managers have a lot on their plate, and ensuring that they make the best of the time they have available is imperative. One way to address this is to ensure that they have access to the business-critical information they need to obtain a holistic view of their customers and stores. This way, managers are empowered to make accurate decisions quickly based on the most-current data and focus on delivering innovative in-store experiences that increase revenue and improve customer loyalty.
In this video, you'll see how Kroger's Microsoft-powered Virtual Store Manager solution enables retail decision-makers to process their tasks electronically, allowing them to make more-effective decisions and create alluring in-store experiences.
6 Strategies to Boost Sales Productivity
Are your fragmented sales tools lacking the visibility you need into your prospects and customers' buying behaviors? This is the reality for the majority of organizations. In fact, according to a TOPO blog, "Sixty percent of companies lack a well-designed sales process." Fortunately, the right sales tools can help you understand and respond to buyers' demands and needs--no matter where they are in the buyer's journey.
In this eBook, you'll learn six strategies to help you leverage the right tools for your sales challenges. Specifically, you'll gain insight into how Dynamics 365 Sales Professional enables you to:
- Meet customers at any point in the journey
- Streamline engagement
- Get holistic performance insights, and more!
Share the eBook with your customers so they can start investing in the right technology to put them on the path to success!
June 24, 2020
Microsoft's Teams Is Its Slack Competitor for Office 365
It's no secret that Slack has taken the corporate world by storm. This successful collaboration app has managed to find a home in the offices and laptops of startups and multinational companies thanks to its intuitive, chat-based functionality. However, today's highly fluid, complex, and remote workforce requires more than just chat-based collaboration—it needs native integration with crucial productivity apps, as well as a secure, flexible document repository that enables multi-team and project cooperation. This is where Microsoft Teams excels.
In this article, you'll learn the competitive advantages of Teams over competing tools, and how Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Office 365 corporate vice president Kirk Koenigsbauer have learned from industry pain points to create a fully integrated, holistic collaboration software solution that is empowering companies to scale and expand across the world.
June 23, 2020
Why smart data strategies will drive the evolution of retail
When e-commerce and online retail first appeared, many people—including some experts—speculated that it signaled the beginning of the end of brick-and-mortar retailers. For a moment, there was near agreement that physical stores were a thing of the past, but this was a misconception.
As with other overblown predictions, the so-called end of retail stores didn't happen. Instead, the industry was taken over by a new breed of tech-savvy retailers that harnessed the power of digital transformation and analytics to create unified, alluring experiences for today's consumers. Retailers are still adapting to this new, digitally driven business model, but most are already reaping the benefits that the new digital ecosystem offers.
In this article, you'll learn about the challenges that retailers can face in analyzing their business performance, and what they can do to improve on their data-driven initiatives.
Igniting SMB Growth with Exceptional Customer Experiences
Today's customers have higher expectations for buying experiences. They interact with businesses across many touchpoints, and they expect those experiences to be seamless and easy. Are you thinking about customer experiences from a customer-centric perspective?
In this productive webinar, you'll hear from a Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft and a Vice President and Principal analyst at Forrester. Together, they discuss why the customer experience is so important and the effect it has on top line revenue.
Additionally, you'll learn how the right CRM enables you to deliver on your customer's expectations. Now, you can keep the customer at the center of your conversation and focus on the hottest leads and most important deals. Empowered with data and insights, sellers can now exceed the highest expectations.
3 characteristics that define the modern workplace
Today's diverse and intergenerational workforce is most productive when it has adequate channels to collaborate in a seamless and effective way. There's a catch, however: teams are far more diverse and remote than ever before, and each organization requires its own distinct approach to digital collaboration. In other words, your workplace tools and applications must be customized based on your teams' diversity, location, and work methods.
With this infographic, you'll learn about the three main characteristics that define our modern workplace and gain insight into what drives productivity and efficiency in today's organizations. After reading it, you'll have a better understanding of current trends and can keep these in mind when creating or modifying your organization's work environment.
Deliver a modern customer journey with Microsoft
In a retail industry increasingly dominated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, digital transformation, and review-based shopping, modern consumers are never short of options for evaluating and purchasing their favorite products and services. While these tools foster remarkable shopping experiences, they also challenge retailers, who must become increasingly innovative in their approaches to consumer-facing solutions and strategies for process optimization.
In this infographic, you'll see how Microsoft Strategic Retail Solutions can be employed during each of these stages to increase employee satisfaction and create revenue-generating experiences.
Five revenue killers and how to defeat them
Have you struggled with creating amazing marketing campaigns that just don't drive revenue? You're not alone! In this eBook, you'll hear from several sales and marketing experts who have walked in your shoes. They know how hard it is to sift through the clutter and identify the leads with the most potential.
This eBook walks customer's through five of the top revenue killers and then offers solid strategies, tactics, and advice to overcome these pitfalls. For example, most all sellers and marketers can relate to revenue killer no. 1: Most sales funnels leak at the top, not the bottom.
Learn how to overcome all-too-common marketing and sales missteps and how Dynamics 365 Sales Professional will help pave the way to for immediate results.
June 16, 2020
Enrich your customer, manager, and employee experiences. Get started with Microsoft Retail Solutions.
Effective retail solutions provide stakeholders with relevant information and insights. Whether you're building shelves that help shoppers find curated offers, apps that give insights into business performance, or work tools that empower employees to do more with less, you must also provide the data that each user needs to make better-informed decisions.
Subscribe now to learn more about how you can create high-impact solutions that elevate customers' shopping experiences through the power of Microsoft Retail Solutions.
Collaborate better with Microsoft Teams. Subscribe to learn more.
Today's global workforce relies on technology to push forward revenue-generating projects. Now more than ever, finding the correct workplace tools is becoming a crucial part of every organization's digital transformation strategy.
Subscribe now to discover how Microsoft Teams is delivering tangible, scalable benefits to companies worldwide. Additionally, learn how Microsoft technologies can empower your business to become a local, regional, or global leader by driving increased efficiency and superior collaboration.
View: Collaborate better with Microsoft Teams. Subscribe to learn more.
J. Walter Thompson creates a global collaboration hub with Microsoft technologies
J. Walter Thompson, one of the world's largest advertising and marketing firms, needed a way for its geographically dispersed teams to effortlessly collaborate, produce great work, and increase efficiency. The agency also needed its workforce to have access to the newest digital workplace technology while enabling integration with existing Microsoft Office 365 tools and applications. Watch this video to learn how Microsoft Teams empowered J. Walter Thompson to drive projects across locations by allowing it to seamlessly add members, create and share content, and deliver on the unique value proposition that the agency has been known for since 1896.
Vision of innovation
Among the objectives of digital transformation is making information more accessible to those who need it, whether they're consumers, decision-makers, or employees. The retail industry is no exception, and businesses have taken advantage of many innovative solutions to enrich their stakeholders' experiences by using customer-facing applications and digital workplace tools. Retailers now have better insights into how their customers perceive their brands, and these businesses are able to make more-informed decisions.
In this video, you'll discover how industry leader Kroger is using Microsoft technology to empower its consumers, employees, and CPG providers with unique digital solutions.
June 9, 2020
Mobile solutions for retailers: Off the shelf or private label?
As mobile devices became more user-friendly, media-focused, and accessible, consumers gain always-on access to the benefits of digital transformation. Such devices also provide retail businesses with the tools to create more-personalized experiences tailored to each user's unique preferences and shopping habits. But the benefits don't stop there. Retailers have realized that digital technology can be as useful for customer-facing applications as it is for internal processes, and they've started employing it to help their workers provide immediate solutions to customer issues.
While mobile solutions have become crucial tools for employees, they pose a new challenge for retailers: Should they choose private-label or off-the-shelf devices? In this article, you'll learn about the pros and cons of each to help you decide which works best for your business.
Enable Seller Productivity by Integrating Office 365 with Dynamics 365 Sales Professional
In our current digital era—we are bombarded by information—making it difficult to navigate all of the data and knowledge thrown at us. Employees and sales reps often complain that there is too much distraction, making it difficult to know what to focus on. In fact, according to an Accenture report, 59% of sellers say they have too many sales tools and that distractions reduce seller's performance by 14%.
Watch this insightful webinar and learn how Dynamics 365 Sales Professional cuts through the distraction by providing a single, intelligent platform turning initial sales contacts into closed deals. The webinar provides an overview of Dynamics 365, an introduction into Dynamics 365 Sales Professional, and a demo of the product.
Introducing Microsoft Teams
How do you empower great ideas across a digital workspace so that they evolve in a fluid and organic matter? This is a critical question to answer for any company with a remote workforce—and with teams growing more diverse and intergenerational every year, it's becoming increasingly complex.
In this video, you'll learn how Microsoft Teams complements the already-robust applications found in Office 365. You'll also discover how both solutions together are enabling some of the world's leading companies to create frictionless digital workplace experiences for their employees.
The virtuous cycle of retail
In business, a virtuous cycle is a set of recurring processes in which the objective of each is to increase the beneficial effect on the next. Not so long ago, the typical purchase pattern was linear. Further, it involved very few steps from the time consumers first learned about a product or service to the time they purchased it. With the arrival of digital transformation, though, both online and brick-and-mortar retailers are adapting to a new virtuous cycle, one in which personalized experiences are the norm and digital customer service tools play crucial roles in making or breaking a purchase every step of the way.
In this infographic, you'll learn how digital technology has driven retail's virtuous cycle and get insights into how you can improve your customers' experiences via Microsoft Retail Solutions.
Customer Story: Argusi
Do you struggle with fragmented business applications that are difficult to use? Perhaps it's a challenge to get your employees caught up and on the same page? This was the case for Argusi, a Netherlands-based supply chain optimization firm, until they implemented Dynamics 365 Sales Professional.
Starting out small, Argusi managed to get by using whatever platforms were available. As they grew, they realized this approach wouldn't scale. Implementing Dynamics 365 Sales Professional alongside their existing Office 365 products, gave them the transparency they needed throughout the entire sales cycle.
Watch this video to see why Argusi is "a big fan" Dynamics 365 Sales Professional and how it transformed their Sales organization.
June 2, 2020
Never miss a post—never miss an opportunity. Subscribe today.
For team members to work in concert together, they need a set of tools designed to work in concert together. Office 365, with Microsoft Teams at the center, enables real-time communication and collaboration among team members, whether they're located across the hall or across the world. And with business intelligence solutions like Microsoft Power BI hosted in Azure, data can be shared and analyzed across the entire enterprise to uncover insights that can help improve the business as a whole. Subscribe now to stay informed on how Teams, Office 365, and other leading Microsoft solutions can help elevate and transform communication, collaboration, and teamwork throughout your organization.
View: Never miss a post—never miss an opportunity. Subscribe today.
Expand your offerings portfolio with innovative digital solutions. Get started with Microsoft Retail Solutions.
Merchandise and customer service have traditionally been the main focus of the retail industry's portfolio. Digital transformation now allows retailers to expand on their main capabilities and develop innovative solutions that boost their bottom line, as well as that of their partners and clients. Digital is reshaping retail into a more diverse, tech-infused industry where innovation is king and disruption creates new collaboration opportunities.
Subscribe now to learn how to get the most from your existing retail applications by leveraging Microsoft technology to diversify your service portfolio.
AEG delivers unforgettable entertainment experiences to fans using Microsoft technologies
Why would a sports fan or music fan choose to attend a live event rather than watch the game from home or listen to their favorite band on headphones? For AEG, a global entertainment company that owns and operates 100+ facilities across four continents as well as produces concerts, festival, and special events, the answer is simple: it's the experience. More to the point, it's the whole experience—not just the event itself, but also everything else surrounding it, from ticket purchases and event access to the pomp and circumstance during the event, all for the express purpose of delivering a more visceral and unforgettable experience for fans. To achieve all of these things—as well as simplify the business side of producing and hosting a larger-than-life event—AEG relies on Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Power BI, and Azure cloud to analyze and share massive amounts of data across its diverse business units, and utilizes Surface devices and the new Surface Hub to enable employees to meaningfully interact with this data. Watch this lively video to see how Microsoft technology is helping AEG not only deliver singular experiences to fans, but also redefine the business of entertainment in the digital age.
Retail as a service
Innovative solutions that increase revenue and generate industrywide disruption are the Holy Grail of digital transformation. Developing such solutions isn't simple, though. It requires accurate insights, significant research and development (R&D), and a stable, accessible platform that can make the solution easily available to partners and clients. The effort can be well worth it, as groundbreaking applications can open up new revenue streams, enable complementary capabilities, and foster long-lasting partnerships that can elevate a business to new heights.
In this video, you'll learn how the Kroger Co. technology division is leading the industry by leveraging Microsoft tools to provide its own innovations as a new offering: retail as a service.
June 1, 2020
Map to Your Customers' Sales Expectation
What do your customers expect from sellers? Wouldn't it be great to easily answer this question! This infographic includes powerful statistics and insight into the minds of customers.
According to McKinsey, the top customer request is to speed up interactions with sellers. This was mentioned two times more often than price. What's more, according to TOPO, 60 percent of companies lack a well-designed sales process.
Great news! Dynamics 365 Sales Professional helps your sellers stay engaged with customers and provides virtual collaboration via Teams.