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The conversation was so human.
Chelsea Cox, a Microsoft retail store associate, remembers chatting with a couple looking for a laptop that would last through grad school. She helped them weigh the pros and cons of a few different Microsoft devices based on their processing power and storage needs.
The best part?
The conversation happened safely via a personalized virtual appointment over Microsoft Teams—all from the comfort of their homes. Cox and other Microsoft retail associates have been using the new personalized shopping appointments experience—released by Microsoft in October 2020—to help customers shop at Microsoft.
“Being able to have personal shopping appointments with our customers brings back the essence of the retail experience,” Cox says. “It allows us to virtually connect with customers, to support them with their product needs.”
We know that our customers love getting personalized recommendations and product support from our retail associates. We wanted to ensure they would be able to have this same experience virtually.
– Lynn Kepl, general manager in Microsoft Digital
Lynn Kepl is a general manager in Microsoft Digital, the engineering team at Microsoft that builds and manages the products, processes, and services that Microsoft runs on. Kepl and her team were no strangers to digital transformation in Microsoft retail—her team handles the infrastructure underpinning the applications and services offered in Microsoft’s physical and online retail stores. The move to digital-first retail after COVID-19 presented an unprecedented opportunity for her team to help bring some of the great in-person services from Microsoft retail stores to customers online.
“We know that our customers love getting personalized recommendations and product support from our retail associates,” Kepl says. “We wanted to ensure they would be able to have this same experience virtually.”
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Microsoft announced its shift from brick-and-mortar stores to a digital-first model that prioritized online retail sales in summer 2020. The move required its retail teams to rethink the customer sales experience while ensuring they continued providing customers with a personalized and convenient way to shop.
“We needed to meet customers where they were at, which is online,” says Kelly Soligon, general manager of Microsoft Digital Stores Marketing.
Getting the new experience in the hands of store associates and customers at such a pivotal time for retail was imperative. Luckily, the team behind the tech was able to repurpose an appointment management system initially created for physical retail stores.
“We knew it was especially important to figure things out in time for the holiday shopping season,” says Chris Haklitch, an engineering program manager at Microsoft Digital who was part of the team that created the experience.
The experience leverages the best of Microsoft technology, including the out-of-the-box capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service to manage appointment scheduling, Microsoft Power Apps portal to run the customer-facing site, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to send follow-up surveys to customers, and Microsoft Power Automate to automate the back-end workflow and send notifications about upcoming appointments.
As for customers, the goal was always to keep things simple and easy.
“All customers have to do is schedule an appointment and join a Microsoft Teams call,” says Pavan Jayavarapu, a senior software engineering manager at Microsoft Digital who helped build out the solution. “Power Automate does all the heavy lifting to manage the workflow and send them email notifications.”
[Learn how Microsoft employees are successfully working remotely with Microsoft Teams. Read about how Microsoft Dynamics 365 and AI automate complex business processes and transactions.]
Embracing user experience design early on
As part of the project, Haklitch partnered with the Microsoft Teams design team and Microsoft Digital’s user experience research and design team, UX Studio, to understand what features they could build into the tool to deliver a user-friendly experience for the retail store associates—something that hasn’t gone unnoticed.
“Now, we can pull up a calendar with our appointments for the day in Microsoft Teams, check out customer’s profiles, and read notes from past sessions for additional context,” Cox says.
Haklitch thinks that this user-centered approach paid off for everyone.
“By working with Microsoft Digital’s UX Studio team, we built an experience rooted in understanding the needs of our retail associates, versus delivering a product on the premise of business and engineering requirements,” Haklitch says. “There’s this extra level of usability and user experience that has been thoughtfully planned out.”
This is the archetype of digital transformation. We took a brick-and-mortar operation and created a seamless experience using Microsoft offerings and very little custom development.
– Chris Haklitch, engineering program manager at Microsoft Digital
As more and more customers and Microsoft store associates use the tool, the team sees opportunities to evolve the personalized shopping experience based on user feedback, including offering more post-sales customer support and consultations with small business owners to help them assess their technology needs. Looking to the near future, Kepl and her team are working on a project that uses 3D modeling to allow customers to better see how Microsoft’s products can fit into their lives.
“We want to bring a value add back to customers and ensure that we learn from their feedback, iterate, and improve their experience,” Jayavarapu says.
Being able to build the personalized shopping solution with Microsoft products? That was the cherry on top.
“This is the archetype of digital transformation,” Haklitch says. “We took a brick-and-mortar operation and created a seamless experience using Microsoft offerings and very little custom development.
Kepl encourages other enterprises to embrace innovation, especially in retail.
“Do research, test, learn, and understand what matters most to customers,” Kepl says. “That will inform where you spend your investments moving forward.”
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