The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Teams

Office/Knowledge Worker Efficiencies From Increased Collaboration Within Microsoft Teams

• Evidence and data.

  Interviewees said using Microsoft Teams as a central, enterprisewide platform made it easier to locate information and to track down colleagues for quick, impromptu collaborations, and that this reduced email traffic and time spent in formal, scheduled meetings. Residing in one tool for most daily tasks enabled office workers to stay focused and in the flow of work. Channels set up in Teams kept work teams organized, communicating, and collaborating efficiently.

  The senior consultant in the digital workspace solutions group for the technology firm said: “We've seen a big cultural change; people [are] changing their mindsets on where and how they collaborate with information. At the start, there were a lot of scheduled meetings: regular 1-hour slots happening daily [and] maybe 2-hour team meetings. The scheduled meetings were by far the most numerous thing that was happening in the business. Once we switched over to Teams, [we] could see scheduled meetings dropping off and ad hoc meetings rising. ... It turns into an evolved chat rather than a scheduled meeting. Before, the mindset used to be knowing [when] a meeting could have been an email. Now, it's knowing [when] that meeting could have been an ad hoc chat.”

  The interviewee continued: “We saw a lot of email- attachment sharing previously, or people would email out documents and there’d be six different versions being emailed around. Now, people just drop a message and talk to someone rather than send an email out to 50 people and wait for a response.”

  The senior consultant also remarked about how Teams made it easier to stay organized on projects. They said: “Now that [we’re] using Teams sites to host [project] data, we're seeing people spending less time searching for information. From a communication point of view, it’s much easier to look for a Team name for a particular project.”

  The interviewee also noted that Teams improved employees’ multitasking abilities. They said: “Across the board — and that includes leadership — just the way you're able to get together in an ad hoc way if you need to [is useful]. It's really easier to find somebody on Teams than it would have been before when [we] were in the office. Somebody could chat with me right now while we’re talking, and I could probably respond to them, and you wouldn’t know. The multitasking aspect of it is so efficient.”

• Modeling and assumptions

  Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization has 16,000 office and knowledge workers, and half are active users of Microsoft Teams in Year 1. This percentage grows to 80% by Year 3 as more office and knowledge workers become familiar with Microsoft Teams.

• The office and knowledge workers who use Microsoft Teams initially save an average of 5 minutes per day or 25 minutes per week. These time savings grow over time as more functionality is added to Microsoft Teams and office and knowledge workers increasingly adopt ad hoc communication and collaboration styles.

• The average fully burdened salary for an office or knowledge worker at the composite organization is $65 per hour.

• These workers reapply 30% of the time they save to their daily or weekly tasks.

• Risks.

  Operational differences that may impact the financial benefit associated with office and knowledge worker efficiencies from increased collaboration within Microsoft Teams include:

• The number and maturity level of the organization’s office and knowledge workers, including their experience, capabilities, and effective use of Microsoft Teams for collaboration. These time savings can be even greater for users who leverage the Teams platform more proficiently.
• The extent to which the organization can encourage additional adoption of Microsoft Teams by office and knowledge workers. Organizations with strong change-management programs may experience much higher high adoption rates.
• Prevailing local compensation rates for office and knowledge workers.

• Results.

  To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $19.6 million.

Frontline Worker Efficiencies From Communicating And Collaborating Through Microsoft Teams

• Evidence and data.

  While several interviewees said the need for better communication was a prime driver for their organization to extend Teams to its frontlines, they said additional Teams functionality bundled on mobile devices made frontline workers even more effective at serving customers. Some frontlines used the Walkie Talkie functionality in Teams to communicate with coworkers on-site, while others relied on traditional chat and voice calling features to connect with peers. Apps in Teams also provided supervisors with an overview of who is on the floor at any given time.

• The director of technology operations for a company in the retail industry told Forrester: “We decided that [the mobile] device would become a ‘store in your pocket’ kind of thing, whereby the workers should be able to do all the functions from that handheld [device]. We use Teams for group communication, chat, video inclusive of Walkie Talkie, Team Shifts, and Teams Tasks. There's a good bundle of activity in there that the stores use.” This interviewee continued: “What’s been very successful is the Walkie Talkie capability, which plays a star role in store communications. In a retail environment, a walkie talkie is really important, because if you want to talk to your person in the stockroom, you just press a button and talk to them. The Walkie Talkie [feature in Teams] was great to be able to replace and move that [function] off of a separate communication device onto the same device. It became part of the license, so we definitely took advantage of it.”

• The senior consultant in the digital workspace solutions group for the technology company said: “Because of the nature of our business, we’re all frontline workers.One of our newest use cases [for Teams] is where we provide field services. We’ll have engineers on-site looking at things [and] fixing issues. ... Having them be frontline workers while still having access to chat and calls [means] team leaders are able to contact them while they’re on-site, particularly where they're working in buildings where there’s no cell signal but there’s Wi-Fi. That's broken boundaries because they’re on a corporate network. They’re actually more contactable now that they’ve got Microsoft Teams on their devices rather than [on] their cell phones.”

• The head of IT for the retail division of the consumer goods company drew a connection between their organization’s implementation of Teams for frontline workers and its improved sales performance. They said: “Recently, we implemented Teams for the [frontline workers] of one of our US retailers and created channels for all of them. The feedback from the US team was really interesting because they said thanks to the implementation of Teams, they have seen a significant increase in sales.” The interviewee could not explain the reason for the increase, but they consider it to be remarkable given the flat business model typically used in the retail industry.

• Modeling and assumptions.

  Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization has 56,000 frontline workers.

• The composite organization deploys Microsoft Teams to 20% of these workers in Year 1, then to an additional 20% in Year 2, and to the remaining 60% in Year 3.

• Initial adoption of Microsoft Teams by frontline workers is 40% in Year 1. This percentage grows to 65% as more frontline workers become familiar with Microsoft Teams.

• Frontline workers who use Microsoft Teams initially save an average of 10 minutes per day. These time savings grow over time as more functionality is added to Microsoft Teams.

• The average fully burdened salary for a frontline worker at the composite organization is $25 per hour.

• The frontline workers reapply 30% of the time they save to their daily or weekly tasks.

• Risks.

  Operational differences that may impact the financial benefit associated with frontline worker efficiencies from communicating and collaborating through Microsoft Teams include:

• The number and maturity level of the organization’s frontline workers, including their experience, capabilities, and effective use of Microsoft Teams for communication and collaboration. These time savings can be even greater for users who leverage the Teams platform more proficiently.

• The extent to which the organization can encourage additional adoption of Microsoft Teams by frontline workers. Organizations with strong change management programs may experience much higher adoption rates.

• Prevailing local compensation rates for frontline workers.

• Results.

  To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 20%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $14.3 million.

Administrative Efficiencies Enabled By Microsoft Teams

• Evidence and data.

  The interviewees’ organizations leveraged apps within Teams to streamline and automate manual workflows, which reduced time spent on administrative tasks, improved turnaround times, and eliminated paperwork.

• The director of technology operations for a company in the retail industry described how their organization’s retail operations used a multistep process to assign tasks at the store level through a legacy intranet site. They said: “[The legacy site] was very old and archaic [when] tracking task activity from central operations down to the stores. That’s moved to Teams and [it] is very good. Now, the head office just points that task to the store, and the store manager then allocates the task to the individuals who are on shift at that point in time based on identity. There’s a single screen of management that the store managers have. It’s easier and has saved time.”

• The head of IT for the retail division of the consumer goods company told Forrester the second app their organization embedded in Teams was an HR solution that hosts payroll information, including schedules. They said: “That’s a significant and fantastic capability because, for the last 20 years, our retail workforce didn’t have digital access to that information ... and their only human relationships were with the store managers.”

• The head of digital workplace for another company in the retail industry said store managers in their company’s largest store previously coordinated schedules for workers who requested shift changes or called in sick using paper forms. However, after piloting the Shifts App in Teams, the team calculated it could save close to $40,000 by replacing its paper- based processes for just that store alone.

• The senior director of digital workplace for a manufacturer relayed how some groups in their organization used the Resource Planning Guide in Teams to share documents and files. They said: “That's a big one: the organizational aspects of sharing documents and files. That’s huge. That’s made everybody more efficient. [We’re] sending links instead of documents.”

• The senior consultant in the digital workspace solutions group for the technology firm spoke about the value of Teams in streamlining administrative work. They said: “We’ve seen a shift in how we do document production for project documentation, building designs, and things like that. A lot of the collaboration now is done solely inside Teams. Just being able to talk to people live in documents rather than [sending] things around ... [is] where we see value.”

  This interviewee added: “We’ve started using the Approvals app as well for documents. When you think of the time spent sending an email to three people and you [couldn’t] track it, it’s now streamlined. ... Being able to use that to get multiple approvals from [a] single [person] or multiple people saves time and streamlines that workflow [of] creating documents [from] start to finish. It also creates an audit trail, so when changes have been made, if six people are collaborating on a document, we have version control set up [which gives us] an audit trail of who changed what at what time. Our legal department and their knowledge workers have been using this and not releasing documents until they’ve been reviewed.”

• Modeling and assumptions.

  Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The composite organization has 16,000 office and knowledge workers, and half are active users of Microsoft Teams in Year 1. This percentage grows to 80% by Year 3 as more office and knowledge workers become familiar with Microsoft Teams.

• The office and knowledge workers who use Microsoft Teams initially save an average of 5 minutes per day on administrative tasks. These time savings grow over time as more functionality is added to Microsoft Teams.

• The average fully burdened salary for an office or knowledge worker at the composite organization is $65 per hour.

• These office and knowledge workers reapply 30% of the time they save to their daily or weekly tasks.

• The composite organization also has 8,000 supervisors for its frontline workforce.

• The composite organization deploys Microsoft Teams to 20% of these supervisors in Year 1, then to an additional 20% in Year 2, and to the remaining 60% in Year 3.

• Initial adoption of Microsoft Teams by frontline worker supervisors is 50% in Year 1. This percentage grows to 80% by Year 3 as more supervisors become familiar with Microsoft Teams.

• The supervisors using Microsoft Teams initially save an average of 20 minutes per day on administrative tasks. These time savings grow over time as more functionality is added to Microsoft Teams.

• The average fully burdened salary for a supervisor of frontline workers at the composite organization is $40 per hour.

• These supervisors reapply 50% of the time they save to their daily or weekly tasks.

• Risks.

  Operational differences that may impact the financial benefit associated with administrative efficiencies enabled by Microsoft Teams include:

• The number and maturity level of the organization’s office and knowledge workers and frontline worker supervisors, including their experience, capabilities, and effective use of Microsoft Teams for administrative tasks. These time savings can be even greater for users who leverage the Teams platform more proficiently.

• The extent to which the organization can encourage additional adoption of Microsoft Teams by these workers. Organizations with strong change-management programs can experience much higher high adoption rates.

• The extent to which the organization introduces custom apps within Teams to streamline and automate administrative processes and workflows. The time savings can be even greater depending on the number and scope of labor- saving applications introduced.

• Prevailing local compensation rates for office and knowledge workers and frontline worker supervisors.

• Results.

  To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $8.1 million.

Efficiencies Using Microsoft Teams As An Announcements Platform

• Evidence and data.

  Several of the interviewees’ organizations put Teams to work as an announcements platform and connected users with their e-learning systems for webinars delivered via Teams. The organizations used Teams to instantly share training content as well as information on new developments and promotions, changes in work guidelines, and FAQs, and they pushed out notifications to the right groups automatically, based on identity.

• The head of IT for the retail division of the consumer goods company said their organization’s e-learning platform was a key enabler and fostered engagement among frontline workers across all brand categories. They said: “Eighteen months ago, we made our e-learning platform directly accessible through Teams as a fully integrated app. The e-learning platform provides content related to new product launches to animate [frontline workers], especially those not directly on our payroll. But it also includes learning content such as ethics training, which is mandatory for all employees.”

  By combining Teams and Azure Active Directory, the organization was able to streamline its onboarding experience, and new joiners are automatically given a digital identity that unlocks access to everything they need for the onboarding process.

• The director of technology operations for a company in the retail industry said that Teams has made webinar-driven training much easier. They said: “Training is now done via Teams ... because you can record it and deploy it very easily. The document repositories make it very easy to share with the store channels. Everyone has access to everything. The documents are there [along with] recordings of people going on training. So, if someone new turns up, it’s not down to central training to do any of the training. If the materials there are still current, they can watch the video [via Teams].”

  This interviewee also related a recent instance of having great results using webinars in Teams to deliver training following a companywide change to point-of-sale (POS) systems. They said: “Rather than struggling to deliver training to a couple stores at a time, we used Teams to create a consistent learning experience that we could record and make available to people to review at any time."

• The senior consultant in the digital workspace solutions group for the technology firm said their organization utilized Teams as its platform for change management. They said: “One thing that we employed right from the start was a custom Teams app that we created and pinned in Microsoft Teams, which fronted a SharePoint site with all of the project information and all of the training materials. Whenever we sent out any communication to people, we could refer them back to this site for all the latest information on Teams. If you needed training on Teams, it directed you to the information app. This meant that people stayed inside the tool. They didn't need to look for an email with a URL in it to find training. It was in Teams. We still use that now. It's updated frequently with information. That was a big part of the change management.”

• Modeling and assumptions.

  Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• For this model, the composite organization uses Teams as an announcement platform for their frontline workers only.

• The composite organization has 56,000 frontline workers and 8,000 supervisors.

• The composite organization deploys Microsoft Teams to 20% of these workers in Year 1, then to an additional 20% in Year 2, and to the remaining 60% in Year 3.

• Initial adoption of Microsoft Teams by frontline workers is 40% in Year 1, and this grows to 65% by Year 3.

• Initial adoption of Microsoft Teams by supervisors is 50% in Year 1, and this grows to 80% by Year 3.

• Frontline workers and supervisors who use Microsoft Teams to keep up with training, new developments, promotions, and changes in work guidelines save an average of 10 minutes per week.

• The average fully burdened salary for a frontline worker at the composite organization is $25 per hour, while the average fully burdened salary for a supervisor is $40 per hour.

• These frontline workers reapply 30% of the time they save to daily or weekly tasks while supervisors reapply 50% to their daily or weekly tasks.

• Risks.

  Operational differences that may impact the financial benefit associated with frontline workers and supervisors using Microsoft Teams as a unified communication platform include:

• The extent to which the organization deploys and uses Microsoft Teams as a unified platform for communication. This model does not consider office and knowledge workers in this calculation; however, organizations can leverage these same capabilities for all employees.

• The number and maturity level of the organization’s frontline workers and supervisors, including their experience, capabilities, and effective use of Microsoft Teams for e-learning and communication. These time savings can be evengreaterdependingontheeffectivenessof the communications platform.

• The extent to which the organization can encourage additional adoption of Microsoft Teams by frontline workers. Organizations with strong change-management programs can experience much higher high adoption rates.

• Prevailing local compensation rates for frontline workers and supervisors.

• Results.

  To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $3.3 million.

Reduced Number Of Service Tickets Due To Chatbot Usage In Microsoft Teams

• Evidence and data.

  Interviewees said implementing chatbots in Teams to resolve common queries led to a reduction in the number of service tickets opened. One said their organization used Teams’ scheduling and resource-management capabilities to schedule small teams of support specialists spread around the world. Service agents in this organization used the chat f unction in Teams to instantly connect to users, which led to resolving tickets faster.

• The senior director of digital workplace for the manufacturer described how their organization integrated a virtual agent into Teams and used it for self-help on easy queries. They said: “We didn't want people to call into the help desk. We wanted them to go to this chatbot that is integrated into Teams. It helps with simple questions like, ‘How do I change my password?’ [and,] ‘How do I set up a meeting in Teams?’ Usually, the answers are right there. We reduced our ticket counts by 80%. Our service desk averaged about 26,000 tickets a month, and now that’s down to under 7,000 a month."

  Behind the chatbot, the manufacturing organization stood up small teams of support specialists and used the resource-management feature in Teams to schedule the staffing for those agents. The interviewee said: “We were looking for a scheduling tool to help with these small groups, and we stumbled across this and utilized it. It was pretty helpful.”

• The director of technology operations for a company in the retail industry indicated their organization explored opportunities to use chatbots within Teams for in-store support on break-fix issues. They said: “It is very early on, with an uptake of 10% so far as part of the trial, and the reduction in tickets from them is about 30%. This was something we needed to do to alleviate pressure. Some of the hardware in stores is pretty archaic and breaks quite a lot, and it’s just churning the same problem over and over again. So, automating that was definitely where we wanted to go. We are very much as a business looking at automation to simplify our processes so they’re very easy to resolve with self-help and self-fix.”

• Modeling and assumptions.

  Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Employees at the composite organization submit an average of three low-level or Tier 1 support requests per year.

• The organization implements chatbots that enable users to resolve common queries themselves, and it adds the application to Microsoft Teams. The use of chatbots reduces the percentage of services tickets received by 30% in Year 1, and half of that can be attributed to increased visibility in Microsoft Teams.

• As more employees use Microsoft Teams and come across the chatbot, the number of service tickets opened decreases over time. The average cost associated with Tier 1 support requests resolved through the chatbot is $5.

• Risks.

  Operational differences that may impact the financial benefit associated with reduced number of service tickets due to chatbot usage in Microsoft Teams include:

• The size and average number of service tickets the organization opens per year.

• The ability of the chatbot to resolve queries, which will vary significantly based on the organization and the knowledge quality and language processing functionality of the underlying chatbot.

• Prevailing local compensation rates for help-desk staff who normally handle service tickets.

• Results.

  To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV of $645,500.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• Centers of excellence for developing custom apps and automated workflows in Teams.

  Interviewees indicated their organizations were in the early stages of developing custom apps to streamline workflows within the Teams platform, but some had set up centers of excellence for the purpose of developing automations for the Teams environment and were collaborating with Microsoft on the development of more apps and integrations for office and knowledge workers and frontline workers.

  The senior consultant in the digital workspace solutions group for the technology firm characterized their organization’s custom Teams application development efforts as still in their infancy. They said: “The citizen-developer side of things is something that really interests us as a service provider. We’re working with Microsoft on apps for the frontline worker, using low code, and empowering these citizen developers to do their own thing. We’re early on that journey at the moment.”

  The senior director of digital workplace for the manufacturer indicated their organization is further along in developing custom apps for the Teams platform. They said: “We have an automation center of excellence that is utilizing those capabilities, for sure. We have a vetting process to determine the place to build your automation, whether it's in Power BI or Power Apps or whatever. We'll direct people along that route and get it going.”

  The head of digital workplace for a company in the retail industry told Forrester their organization worked with Microsoft to set up a Power Automate center of excellence. They said: “We created a team of three to four core enthusiasts: • senior developers in Power Automate who were interested in automation. We reached out to our markets and countries to say, ‘Hey, we are here to coach, mentor, and support you. We have licenses for Power Automate, and if you have an interest to do this on your own, we are there to support you in this journey. This has really just skyrocketed, to be honest. Some markets have created their own Power Automate organizations with developers creating workflows and automating tasks.”

• Ease of integration.

  Interviewees said they appreciate how easy it is to integrate applications within Teams. The senior director of digital workplace for the manufacturer said: “There are so many different things that we do outside of Teams that have an integration to it, and we’ve started to use that. We have a ton of apps that we use through Teams now, including Power BI, Viva Insights, and Power Automate.”

  The director of technology operations for a company in the retail industry said Microsoft Graph (which Teams uses) took some learning but that once the organization’s developers understood it, they had no problems controlling and posting to Teams via APIs. The interviewee said: “Teams is very much a presentation layer where we post to Teams and present information in Teams. If there’s Teams tools that make sense to use, especially from our store standpoint, then we’ll utilize them. If you want to communicate, even if it's not written in Teams, it's posted into Teams.”

• Improved data security.

  Use of Teams as a platform pushed interviewees’ organizations to shore up their governance and identity management practices, which indirectly enhanced security in the process. By consolidating collaboration and communication apps on the Teams platform, security teams could ensure that users followed security and compliance policies to reduce the risk of a data leak via unsupported third-party apps while still enabling employees to work anywhere and on any mobile device. Enrollment in multifactor authentication went up and strengthened these organizations’ security postures.

  The senior consultant in the digital workspace solutions group for a technology firm observed: “Fewer systems equal less risk because there’s less opportunity for people to share information. The big thing we did at the start of the project in terms of security and engaging security really early on was to build up and demonstrate the capability of Teams, its governance, and the extra layers of security that the other platform couldn’t provide that well.”

  The director of technology operations for a company in the retail industry emphasized the need for strong governance around identity when using Teams: “What has made us more secure was moving to Teams and getting our identity right. Identity was the thing that made us more secure. ... To get to Teams meant that we needed to be clear in identity. And our identity effort was what tightened up our organization, ensuring MFA across all accounts down to the frontline workers. That in itself was huge from a footprint standpoint because we weren't going to put Teams in without doing the right thing around identity.”

  The senior director of digital workplace for the manufacturer told Forrester their organization experienced situations in which employees failed to set up teams in Microsoft Teams with the appropriate levels of privacy, which led to situations in which some people gained access to information they shouldn’t have seen. The interviewee said: “Along with the power and capability, you have to have good governance and, really more so than governance [and] training because an individual user can do anything and set up things. You’ve got to understand what you're doing.”

  This interviewee continued: “It hasn't been a big problem, but there have been a couple things, so we're working through how we educate folks to pay attention to what they're doing when they set something up. [We ask:] ‘Should this be public or does it need to be private? What kinds of documents are you going to be keeping there? Are they really shareable with everybody or not? If not, then you need to keep it private [and] manage your team appropriately.’ All of that.”

• Cultural change.

  The interviewees said their organizations’ cultures changed as a result of adopting Teams as a unified communication and collaboration platform.

  The senior consultant in the digital workspace solutions group for the technology firm said: “With us being a global operation, [Microsoft Teams has] broken down barriers in terms of time zones and contacting people. ... There is less reliance on email now. That ad hoc ‘drop in an IM, have a quick conversation, and it’s done and off my plate’ [approach] is becoming more prominent now, and it’s ultimately made our execs more accessible to us. We’ve been told that if we ever want to speak to one of our execs, [we should] drop them an IM. Five years ago, I never would have dreamt of sending an IM to one of our execs.”

  The senior director of digital workplace for the manufacturer was more circumspect and said: “I don’t know if [Microsoft Teams] changed the nature of work, but we found capabilities to do more things. People have found ways to use the calendar or the workforce management piece of it. My team keeps track of our tasks and plans and all the individual things that we're doing. It just helps people be more organized.”

  This interviewee offered advice for organizations contemplating the use of Teams. They said: “Don't be too prescriptive. If frontline workers want to ping the CEO, let them ping the CEO. Why would you make that off-limits? The whole point of having a collaboration tool is that you collaborate. Nobody’s off-limits. Regulations should be around protection and security as in identity, not restrictions on roles and on how someone operates with it. Give people the tools they need to do their job and they do their job. Let people form teams. Don't try and dictate Teams to them. You can’t say that you care about your employees and want everyone to feel enriched and empowered if you don’t give them a voice. We found that’s been pretty good — just to give people absolute freedom to do this stuff.”

• Increased collaboration with clients.

  The senior director of digital workplace for the manufacturer told Forrester: “It’s way easier to collaborate. They’re just part of the team. I’m on calls all day long with people from outside the organization. It’s fast. It’s efficient. We share content. So, it works well.”

  The senior consultant in the digital workspace solutions group for the technology firm said: “Overall, we’ve seen more of our clients now sharing items through SharePoint. We’ll have those Teams sites built up, and we’ll invite clients to collaborate on Teams, which we [did not do] before. Traditionally, you would send a document out and wait for clarification, comments, or sign- of f. Whereas, now it’s just in one place, and you share it out, and I [get] it.”

  This interviewee also explained that their organization’s experience using Teams gave it added credibility with clients. They said: “Clients see that we do a lot of Microsoft 365 work, and they see that we use it internally as well, which is a positive for them because whenever we roll out Microsoft Teams with a client, we make sure that we use Microsoft Teams from day one. We set up channels with them, give them access, and let them know this is how we’re doing it from now on. And that helps with adoption.”

  The interviewee also described how their organization’s clients had begun to use Teams to contact field service agents directly. They said: “Instead of the traditional way of raising a ticket with the service desk and waiting for someone to turn up, our customers are now just contacting field services directly on Teams. This is not always great for process. But, [for] a customer, making field support more accessible through Microsoft Teams is a bonus for them, and we want to try and incorporate that into the support experience.”

  The head of IT for the retail division of the consumer goods company said their organization had not yet directly collaborated with customers on Microsoft Teams, but they noted this was an important directive in the firm’s future roadmap.

• Increased collaboration with partners.

  Interviewees said collaborating with partners is also easier through Teams. The senior director of digital workspace for the manufacturing firm said: “There's roughly 100,000 people using Teams [at my organization] today. Many of them interact with suppliers at one point or another just through meetings or Voice or whatever the channel might be.”

• Improved employee engagement.

  Interviewees gave examples of coworkers using Teams to inspire each other, give spontaneous shout outs to recognize outstanding customer service, and wish associates a happy birthday through chat.

  The head of IT for the retail division of the consumer goods company described how Teams unlocked a friendly spirit of competition among frontline workers from their organization’s different stores. They said: “Each store wanted to show the others what they did in terms of merchandising, innovation, [and] new ideas. All those good ideas went into Teams channels so everyone could benefit from them. ... That’s something we didn’t control. ... We said [to the store managers] that if you can master that, you can really do something incredible because you can stimulate your team and leverage collective intelligence between hundreds of collaborators.”

• Microsoft support.

  Interviewees had positive things to say about Microsoft service and support. The director of technology operations for a company in the retail industry said: “The account team is really good. We’re not the most structured company, but because of the work we’ve done with Teams, we also developed a close relationship with the product team that works for Teams. We were able to provide feedback on some enhancements we needed for Teams to be really slick for the in-store team rather than [for] the account team. We’re very fortunate to have that voice inside Microsoft.”

  The senior director of digital workplace for the manufacturing company spoke about their organization’s close relationship with Microsoft. They said: “We are very engaged with Microsoft. I meet with [Microsoft service and support] probably two to three times a week on various things. Due to the scale and scope and cost of the relationship that we have with them, we get some credits so they bring other partners to bear that could help in a particular place as we evolve and find better ways to use the capabilities that they have in their tools.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Microsoft Teams and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Integration with other products.

  Each interviewee said their organization was exploring opportunities to integrate other applications within Teams after first determining whether they would work better within Teams or as standalone apps.

  The senior consultant in the digital workspace solutions group for the technology firm noted: “There are other things in the pipeline that are being considered, like integrating Power Apps in our ITSM (IT service management) tool. For example, [we’re] looking at how we can integrate a chatbot into Microsoft Teams to support our users that way.”

  The head of digital workplace for a company in retail said their organization is looking for ways to leverage more of the Microsoft product suite, especially for frontline workers. They said: “We have offered the organization a smorgasbord of opportunities. So far, we are just at the beginning of trying to eat more than just one thing at this smorgasbord. That’s an untapped opportunity for us.”

  The director of technology operations for another company in retail said their organization is also focused on the frontline. They said: “It’s definitely about store operations in Teams. Joining Teams up to store ops is where we see opportunities to do things. Our smart fitting-room service is an example. We’ve got a number of stores where we have smart fitting rooms where you can walk in and hang your clothes up and, because of the RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags, it populates a screen of what you've got in there, and you can ask the store staff for an item in a different size, and it will show up in an app on their device. Teams will push notifications to say, ‘This cubicle requires this dress in this size.’ A store associate can acknowledge [it], and it comes up on a screen in the cubicle, letting the shopper know the associate by name will be with [them] in a minute.”

• Automation.

  The senior consultant in the digital workspace solutions group at a technology organization said automation was on the roadmap for their firm. They said: “We’re investing quite heavily in automation. [Microsoft] Power Platform will play a role in that, and Teams will probably be the conduit to deliver some of that to those frontline workers and end users.”

• New Teams functionality, including Teams Premium.

  Microsoft introduced more than 450 new Teams capabilities in the past year alone, and that did not go unnoticed by the interviewees. In particular, they said they appreciate the enhanced security and manageability features in Teams Premium. The senior director of digital workplace for the manufacturer told Forrester: “We’re looking at future releases of Teams and what they’re going to do from a Teams Premium perspective. One of the things I was given access to is intelligent recap, which integrates OpenAI’s GPT (generative pretrained transformer) into Teams. So, in this crazy world of too many meetings, I’ll have the ability to pick and choose a little bit more, [like] which meetings I go to and which ones I won’t go to, and I can go back and look at Intelligent Recap on my own time and have all the information I need without having to attend the meeting.”

  The head of digital workplace for a company in the retail industry mentioned Microsoft’s Viva Connect, and they said: “We haven’t really put our foot down on Viva Connect yet. We are looking at it and testing it a little bit, but it’s in another part of the organization, so I cannot speak for them on this.”

• Opportunities unlocked following network upgrades for Teams.

  The director of technology operations for a company in the retail industry explained how network upgrades to accommodate Teams led their organization to modernize its store environment. They said: “We had a Teams platform for communication. But when you wanted to use things like Walkie Talkie, you had to communicate back to Microsoft and then back to the device. Quite a few stores didn’t have the bandwidth to run it, so that’s what drove the original use case. Then there were all these other things that were fast follows off the back of this use case. Store strategy dictates that we put a lot more modern tech in stores, and infrastructure is a key enabler of that. [One store has now moved to fully RFID-driven sales, including self-checkout.”

• Customer engagement through Teams.

  The head of IT for the retail division of the consumer goods company said a key pillar in their organization’s road map was extending in-store interactions with consumers to the online world to keep them engaged when they’re not physically present in the stores. The interviewee said: “We want to pursue and continue the interaction between the [frontline worker] and the consumer even if the consumer is at home. That’s something we are thinking about. It’s very exciting. It’s just the beginning. We haven’t explored the entire scope [or] the entire possibility and potential. It’s tremendous.”

Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Appendix ).