River Island responds to changing tides in retail with Microsoft Teams

Consolidating devices and streamlining communication on the shop floor

River Island was already exploring the use of Teams when the COVID-19 pandemic created an urgent need to deploy a communication solution to its entire workforce. After a rapid Teams rollout, accomplished in only two weeks, Cooper and his colleagues began to explore how using Teams could go beyond simple communication, heightening customer service efficiency and boosting collaboration across the company. 

In the past, frontline workers were disconnected from the corporate side of the business and had to juggle multiple devices and applications. Kerrie Toll, Store Leader at River Island King’s Lynn, describes the use of Teams and Samsung devices as a “game-changer.” Rachel Trivino, Store Leader at River Island Milton Keynes, agrees. “I love to be out on the shop floor with my team, but I was often locked away in the office dealing with the daily running of the store. With Teams, I now do a lot of my work from my Samsung device on the shop floor. I have better access to customers and staff in real time.” 

Prior to Teams, employees used a badge radio to communicate about store operations—for instance, checking for available sizes in the stock room, a process that could lead to lag time between a customer making a request and getting an answer. Today, they use the Walkie Talkie app in Teams to instantly connect with colleagues from anywhere in the store. Dan Butcher, Flagship Store Leader at River Island Sheffield Meadowhall, describes how using Walkie Talkie helps employees better serve customers across the three-floor flagship location that he manages. For starters, the frontline workers eliminated the cumbersome badge radios. “Now that we’ve consolidated devices and use Walkie Talkie in Teams, all the employees on our shop floor can communicate easily by pressing a dedicated push-to-talk button on their Samsung devices,” he says. “This speeds up our processes when serving customers.” Trivino and her colleagues at River Island Milton Keynes use the Walkie Talkie app to make sure that customers are never left searching for an associate to help them. “If I’m busy with a customer and see another customer is trying to get my attention or looks like they might need help, I can Walkie Talkie the rest of my team and ask if someone can assist the waiting shopper,” she says. 

Walkie Talkie in Teams also helps Butcher get an overview of who’s on the floor at any given time because he can quickly check in with various employees using the app. “Management get good visibility from Teams and Walkie Talkie,” he says. “Giving everyone Teams on Samsung Galaxy XCover devices means that we’ve all got a one-stop destination for everything we need on the shop floor.”

Today, Teams serves as the single pane of glass for frontline worker communication and collaboration. River Island employees also use a smart data capture app from Scandit to further consolidate devices and streamline work. Because the app is accessible on employees’ Samsung devices, they no longer need a separate barcode scanning device. “By putting the Scandit app and the Walkie Talkie app in Teams on our Samsung devices, we’ve reduced the number of devices employees need to carry and created a more seamless shopping experience for our customers,” says Toll. “In the past, if we needed to check the availability of a certain item, we had to enter a password in the scanner and wait for the data to load. It was very time-consuming, whereas with the Scandit app, it’s so quick.” 

Promoting a more connected retail culture with Teams

Store leaders also use Teams to interact with colleagues in other locations, sharing best practices, fostering connections, and engaging with other areas of the company. “Now that we have the consistency of Teams throughout River Island, we aren’t in that store bubble anymore,” says Butcher. “I use Teams to speak with people across the business, like collaborating with colleagues in senior management and store leadership roles in other locations.” 

River Island has a popular “all-store” Teams channel with 15,000 participants and a “top 20” channel for store leaders at the biggest cash-taking sites across the company. “Members of the top 20 channel use Teams to create presentations, coauthor documents, and collect feedback from one another,” says Butcher. “It’s more interactive than working via email like we used to.” Toll agrees that using Teams has helped create more fluid communications across River Island as a whole. “Before Teams, I wouldn’t necessarily have spoken to territory leaders or the head of retail,” she says. “From my perspective at the store level, it seemed like the people in those roles were out of reach. Now, I regularly chat in Teams with people from all levels of the business.” In fact, River Island’s Chief Executive Officer, Will Kernan, uses Teams to post weekly business updates that are accessible to every River Island employee. “With Teams, everyone easily picks up the corporate communication on their devices,” adds Cooper. “We use Teams to drive transparency of communication.” 

Cooper also describes a more consistent, effective training experience for River Island employees via Teams. “Training has been made 10 times easier by using Teams,” he says. “Now, we’re able to train staff remotely rather than putting together bespoke videos or visiting different sites for in-person training.” When a recent change was made to POS systems across River Island, the company used Teams meetings functionality to deliver the training for the new technology with great results. “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 then record and make available to people to review at any time,” says Cooper. 

Leaders also use Teams to ensure that store employees never miss a chance to be recognized for their efforts. “We share a lot of rewards and recognition through Teams,” says Trivino. Toll uses Teams to make sure that outstanding customer service gets recognized in the moment. “We do little shout-outs over Teams,” she says. “For instance, if someone at the till does a great job informing the customer about their options to purchase an item in the store and have it shipped to their home, we’ll tag them and say, ‘Well done!’ over Teams. It also creates a bit of healthy competition and boosts up everyone to try to do their best.” Toll even uses Walkie Talkie functionality for praise when she’s away from the store, such as signing in to wish a colleague happy birthday. “Reward and recognition go a long way to keep everyone connected,” she says.

Simplifying task distribution and saving time

Before launching Teams for retail employees at River Island, the company used a multiple-step process to allocate tasks from the corporate level to the shop floor. Leadership wanted to shift to a more efficient, accurate approach, so River Island switched to using Microsoft Tasks in Teams underpinned by Microsoft Planner and Microsoft To Do for a streamlined, consistent process. “In the past, I had to sign in to the corporate internet from a machine in the back office to get a task list every morning,” recalls Toll. “Then, I would write down the tasks, prioritize them, and relay the information to my management team.” She describes the use of Tasks in Teams, which brings task lists directly to her device via Teams, as a “little win.” Says Toll, “Using Tasks makes things more seamless for everyone involved. I can delegate tasks and check completion easily.” 

Cooper notes that Tasks in Teams is part of an overall company initiative to encourage retail employees to be more present on the shop floor and ensure that messages land the way they’re intended to. “Consistency was a challenge in the past because a diluted message is never received in the same way across every store,” he says. “With Tasks, we can rest assured that the same messages get shared and that frontline workers are empowered to be more efficient with their time.” 

Adds Cooper, “The advantage of using Tasks for our head office is that it provides a single view of all tasks that are allocated to all stores. This creates a central repository of where we are against the tasks that have been applied.” Toll also sees a correlation between the ease of use of Tasks in Teams and stores’ profitability. “Saving time nearly always results in saving resources and costs,” she says. “By freeing up time that used to be spent on task allocation, we can be more available to customers and ultimately run a more successful store.” 

Shift management gets an update via Teams

Scheduling has historically presented issues for River Island store leaders like Trivino, Toll, and Butcher. The company is on a journey to make schedule creation and distribution easier with Shifts in Teams, a schedule management tool that store leaders use to create schedules from within Teams. Trivino was an early adopter of Shifts and now describes the tool as her favorite aspect of Teams. “Prior to using Shifts, scheduling was such a drawn-out process,” she says. “It was very paper-heavy.” Trivino now uses Shifts to create a more transparent digital scheduling process that saves time and helps employees take ownership of their schedules. “I use Shifts in Teams to handle staff planning better,” she says, noting that employees can use Shifts to sign themselves up for overtime hours, democratizing the process. “It’s a really fair way of distributing overtime,” Trivino continues. “Now, the store runs more effectively. It’s easier to follow your schedule when it’s accessible on a mobile device versus printed on a piece of paper.” 

Currently, 20 River Island locations use Shifts, with the whole network of stores to follow. When the entire River Island network begins to use Shifts, Cooper anticipates that store leaders will have more time to dedicate to other tasks. “Moving to a managed, automated scheduling process will take a significant load off our store management team,” he says. The move will also reduce the use of shadow IT because, in the past, managers often used a variety of tools to distribute schedules or follow up with employees about open shifts. “For example, introducing Teams and Shifts will reduce the number of people using WhatsApp for store communications,” says Cooper. “That means store leaders have everything they need in one place rather than needing to monitor multiple tools. And keeping corporate communications within Teams helps those communications stay secure.”

Reacting to customer needs with new tools

Butcher, who began his career at River Island as a 16-year-old seasonal employee, has had a front-row seat to retail’s evolution. “Over time, customers have increasingly expected more from us,” he says. “We’ve got to constantly adapt and keep up with changing demands. The introduction of new technology like Teams, Samsung devices, and the Scandit app helps us massively as we try to meet the expectations of our customers.” 

To Cooper, the benefit of Teams is that it creates the opportunity for two-way communication, which the retail landscape has lacked. “Teams isn’t just about communication consumption,” he says. “Our frontline workers on the shop floor have valuable insights. We use Teams to empower those employees to deliver their insights in real time rather than having their messages get diluted as they move up through the layers of management.” Encouraging employees to have a voice is one of the core principles of River Island’s family culture, and it’s finding new expression with the use of Microsoft tools like Teams. “Providing employees with Teams helps give everyone an opportunity to share their voice and to hear what’s going on across the business,” says Cooper. 

Find out more about River Island on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.