Marks & Spencer combines 137 years of experience with Microsoft 365 digital tools to usher in the future of retail

In addition, M&S is continuously running trials across its five 10x digital stores to help deliver innovative technology, which radically improves the experience for customers. Some of these M&S expands across the estate, such as its video-powered retail service, while others it ultimately decides not to take forward- as part of its test & learn strategy. 

The digital first strategy extends to employees. Today, Marks & Spencer maintains its focus on exceptional customer service with a digital-first approach that empowers employees to do their jobs with modern, digital tools that make life easier.

“By becoming digital-first, we have gained so much more insight into what our customers want and how we can operate our stores to best serve them,” says Andrew Redman, Head of Technology, Colleague Experience and Retail Platforms at Marks & Spencer. “Microsoft 365 is a key part of this—we use the digital tools to streamline work for our colleagues on the shop floor, helping them focus on customers, and connect the entire organization to share insights faster.”

Marks & Spencer is also looking to digital tools to advance another of its key goals: sustainability. Through its “Plan A” initiative, the company has committed to building a more sustainable future. “Making digital tools available to everyone is a big part of how we plan to reduce paper use and conserve resources,” says Scott Townend, Programme Manager at Marks & Spencer.

Digital collaboration across the business: Global employees connect in Teams

Marks & Spencer’s digital transformation was already underway when COVID-19 prompted the business to accelerate an ongoing transition from Skype for Business to Teams. “Teams was the tool that supported our staff to continue working from home in the midst of the pandemic,” says Stephen Bolton, Product Owner, Communication and Collaboration at Marks & Spencer. “We now have 95 percent of store colleagues using Teams. It’s the collaborative workspace everyone uses on a daily basis to communicate, solve problems, ideate, and get work done.”

From the beginning of the health crisis, Teams proved instrumental for keeping global offices connected while Marks & Spencer employees worked from home in the United Kingdom. “Over the course of the pandemic, we equipped our international sourcing offices with Teams Rooms systems like the ones we have at our London headquarters,” explains Bolton. “These are the offices where we source our clothing products. Normally, colleagues would send clothing samples to London or employees would travel to see the products in person.” When COVID-19 restrictions complicated both those methods, employees used the video capabilities in Teams meetings and Surface Hub interactive whiteboards to review new designs and keep the business moving forward. “In the midst of travel restrictions, Teams was instrumental in maintaining those business-critical conversations and continuing to work through unexpected challenges,” says Bolton.

Marks & Spencer continues to adapt physical office spaces to accommodate how employees work today. “As some people begin to return to the office, we have focused on maximizing the capabilities of Microsoft Teams Rooms systems so that remote participants and in-person ones can get the most out of meetings,” says Bolton. Office-based employees are also experimenting with features like coordinated meetings to bring Teams Rooms devices and Surface Hub into the same meeting. “We use coordinated meetings with Surface Hub as a digital whiteboard within our Teams Rooms spaces,” says Bolton. “The feature helps remote and in-person participants contribute equally and makes it simple to create a powerful collaborative environment for colleagues to ideate and solve problems.”

At the Marks & Spencer London Headquarters, recent hardware upgrades have included the Lenovo ThinkSmart Hub Gen 2 for Microsoft Teams Rooms and the Lenovo ThinkSmart Cam. “We chose the ThinkSmart Cam to enhance our Teams Rooms setup in part because of the active speaker tracking feature,” says Bolton. “It helps people joining from home to see their colleagues’ expressions and feel as if they are in the same room.”

Today, Marks & Spencer employees use Teams live events for large-scale meetings. “Every week, our retail leadership team connects with 600+ store and regional managers across the country to discuss trade and communicate the priorities for the week ahead,” says Townend. “ Using Teams live events to facilitate these meetings has made them much more effective—people feel more involved and engaged.”

From corporate offices to the shop floor: Colleagues use Teams to drive strategy

Prior to launching Teams across all areas of the business, communicating important updates with frontline workers was a challenge. The business relied on managers to communicate with colleagues on the shop floor using a cascade approach. “Today, our store colleagues use the Teams mobile app to get information directly on a combination of Surface Go 2 tablets, Honeywell handheld devices, and their own personal devices, which allows them to access Teams from anywhere,” says Bolton.

Consolidating on a single platform has helped streamline communication and made it easier for employees on the frontlines of customer service to communicate with other areas of the business, for instance checking stock in other locations or sharing key features of a best-selling product. “Before Teams, we had fixed phones, email, and various options to communicate,” says Redman. “Consolidating on Teams provides a much better colleague experience and simplifies communication that was not structured in the past.”

Store managers have replaced weekly corporate emails assigning store priorities with Tasks in Teams, which presents business priorities from To Do and Planner. “Task publishing has created more transparency into how individual stores are functioning,” says Townend. “It’s a big improvement over sending emails, which lacked a way to quickly gain insights into how various tasks have been executed.”

Marks & Spencer envisions Teams as a single front door to everything employees need to get work done. Nicole Edwards, Retail Communications and Engagement Manager, has seen the company’s SharePoint-based intranet evolve from an overwhelming repository of more than 40,000 documents to a streamlined, highly searchable platform accessible in Teams. “We have reshaped our intranet, reducing the number of documents by 93 percent,” she says. Edwards and her colleagues look forward to adding Viva Connections employee engagement platform to the Teams experience, helping colleagues uncover personalized insights and engage with conversations. “We view Viva Connections as the final piece for achieving our vision of a more individualized digital space where employees can find information that’s important to them, from pay slips to articles of interest,” says Edwards.

Supporting culture: Boosting sustainability and inclusivity initiatives with digital tools

Marks & Spencer uses Microsoft 365 tools, including Teams and Power Apps, to support the organization’s ongoing sustainability efforts. “The use of handheld devices and Teams helps support the organization’s ‘Plan A’ initiative for a sustainable future,” says Townend. “We wanted to make sure we were doing the right thing and empowering our managers to go paperless.” Today, managers consolidate sales numbers and important information in OneNote to eliminate the need to print physical copies, saving each store a great deal on paper and printing costs. And, work schedules for each of Marks & Spencer’s 600 owned UK locations are posted to Shifts in Teams, a big upgrade from the previous method of posting paper schedules once a week and further reducing stores’ reliance on paper. “We have reduced paper use by one third annually by switching to Surface devices and using Teams to store communications,” says Townend. “We expect to see that impact grow as we deploy more digital tools to the frontline workforce.”

Microsoft tools have also been key to advancing accessibility initiatives at Marks & Spencer. “Around 20 percent of the population of the United Kingdom lives, works, and shops with a disability,” says Cleo Thompson, Group Head of Inclusion and Diversity at Marks & Spencer. “The use of Teams has been an absolute changemaker for inclusivity.” Groups like the “Buddy Network,” a network of more than 300 Marks & Spencer employees with an interest in well-being issues and accessibility, gather in Teams to help advocate for these important issues within the business. Lorna Woodman, Project Manager for Visual Systems and cofounder of the Buddy Network at Marks & Spencer, found that the group’s visibility improved with the widespread use of Teams within the business. “In the past, knowledge of these groups was more word-of-mouth, but with Teams, it’s easier for people to discover and join the network,” she says. “This is great for raising the profile of accessibility in our culture. It all comes back to using digital tools to break down isolation for colleagues across the business.”

During COVID-19, the Buddy Network used Teams as a platform for global mental health awareness sessions. “Mental health has been on everyone’s mind throughout the pandemic,” says Woodman. “We put on 90-minute virtual workshops for groups in Turkey, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and India using Teams. It’s been amazing to be able to facilitate those conversations and the feedback has been really positive.”

And, when the Buddy Network began to pursue a “disability confident employer” certification on behalf of the business, it used Teams to ensure that crucial meetings went ahead despite the pandemic. “Without Teams, we couldn’t have gotten everyone together to have those conversations—it was instrumental to doing the work we needed to achieve the certification.”

When Marks & Spencer launched the “sunflower lanyard” initiative designed to help shoppers with hidden disabilities signal that they might need additional assistance, Power Apps in Teams was a key part of the process. “Four separate individuals from four very different places in the business suggested that Marks & Spencer adopt the sunflower lanyard scheme through our Suggest to Steve app in Teams,” says Rose Stuart, Customer Experience Project Manager at Marks & Spencer. “As a result, we are now the first retailer to roll out sunflower lanyards to all our UK-owned stores.”

To continue promoting accessibility, Marks & Spencer employees use Microsoft accessibility features like captioning and accessibility checker. “There is an education aspect as well,” says Woodman. “We are on a mission to make sure that anyone who produces a slide deck, a PDF, or any type of document uses Accessibility Checker.” Woodman also notes that the ability to record meetings, adjust the playback speed, and produce a transcript are popular accessibility features. “It’s simple things that make such a difference,” she says. “Colleagues of all abilities benefit from accessibility features like slowing down the playback speed of a Teams meeting recording or using captioning to help them stay focused on what’s being said.”

Bringing a tradition of customer care to a new retail landscape

As a retailer with more than a hundred years of experience, Marks & Spencer is adept at meeting changing customer demands. Today, the company matches its future-looking strategy with digital tools to usher in a new way of doing business—all without losing sight of the customer service the brand is known for.

“We are consistently looking for ways to enhance how colleagues access information and connect with each other in order to provide a better experience for our customers,” says Sacha Berendji, Group Property, Store Development and Technology Director. “Microsoft 365 has proven to be a major component of how we make that possible.”