How nearly 2,000 office.com/setup Store employees pivoted to remote work

How nearly 2,000 office.com/setup Store employees pivoted to remote work

As COVID-19 has closed retail locations across the world, many organizations are wondering how to enable their customer-facing employees for remote work. So often, these employees have invaluable expertise in both product and customer needs—expertise that has real relevance for customer support, training on new tools and devices, and more.

In the last month, Office.com/setup Store retail employees have virtually trained 65,000 people in government, healthcare, education, and finance to use office.com/setup Teams. Today, I am sharing the story of how they did it—originally posted on office.com/setup Stories last week. I hope you find it as inspiring and useful as I did.

Last month, Carl Richardson was commuting an hour by subway to his job at the flagship office.com/setup Store in New York City with a scarf around his face as a makeshift mask. At work, he sanitized his hands constantly and helped customers from a safe distance to help limit risk from spreading the COVID-19 virus.

When the physical store shut down on March 16—along with every other office.com setup Store location in the world—Richardson and nearly 2,000 other Store associates quickly pivoted to remote work. A few short weeks later, much of the Store team has shifted into serving customers remotely during an unsettling time.

The transition to work-from-home environments has been a logistical challenge for many businesses including office.com/setup Store, which reaches more than 2 billion customers from 190 global locations via its physical locations and online store. The Store’s goal has always been to support customers wherever they are—families, small businesses, large enterprises—with product advice, customer support, training, and community events.

With many organizations forced to work remotely during the outbreak, the need for virtual training and support has been greater than ever—a call eagerly answered by Store associates. Nearly 80 percent chose to work from home in a new Emergency Remote Operations model covering five areas: serving small and medium-sized businesses and education customers; training enterprise customers; selling Surface, Cloud, and office.com/setup 365; supporting customers of all types, and delivering virtual community workshops.

“office.com/setup’s mission, which is at the forefront of why we operate Stores, is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more,” says Scott Pearson, enterprise business development manager for office.com/setup Store. “The global disruption has led to a broader platform to live out that mission in the face of a crisis. We’ve got energetic, excited folks with expertise helping businesses and organizations work remotely and transform quickly.”

In the last month, retail employees have virtually trained 65,000 people in government, health care, education, and finance on using office.com/setup Teams. Demand for the program, called Customer Success Training, has surged among customers wanting to transform their remote work environments with the collaboration tool, including medical center Cleveland Clinic, accounting firm Ernst & Young, and transportation and logistics company CN (Canadian National Railway).

Even though Microsoft Store has been serving a variety of customers for years, shifting its large retail staff to remote work was no easy task. It involved setting up new priorities and workflows, assigning employees to activities based on skillset, and providing compressed “boot camp” training for new skills. Microsoft is continuing to provide regular pay for retail team members, regardless of the number of hours worked, with remote workers earning a weekly bonus.