- One of the areas that I'm really excited about
is how we're working to bring people together
with the physical and digital world.
This is the next frontier
of business process transformation.
If you look at what we have done
with digital automation and digital applications
on a PC or a mobile device,
we are just bringing that same level of innovation
to physical spaces.
The ability to connect the physical and digital
opens up new ways for companies
to optimize how they lay out their factories,
provide assistance to their field service workers
in every corner of the planet,
and use insights from product usage
to enable subscription-based billing models.
All ultimately enabling better experiences
for their customers and employees.
The next scenario we are going to show you
is from Marks & Spencer,
a leading international retailer based in the UK,
who is using Connected Spaces to understand
traffic and customer behavior within its stores
to design the most effective displays,
minimize queuing, and ensure the right staffing levels.
And as they are looking for customer patterns
through cameras and computer vision,
they are doing it with the privacy and security
of their customers at the forefront.
This is a core design element of Connected Spaces.
Video feeds from cameras or processed locally in the store
with no personally identifiable information
tracked or stored.
Let me hand it over to Alissa to see how it works.
- Thanks Charles.
Picture this, in this very moment,
millions of people across the globe are shopping online.
They're heading to a website and it's easy.
They're presented with an optimized experience
featuring top products and offers
where they're most likely to look.
And there's never a queue.
Now, compare that to most physical store locations
you've walked into.
How often did the retailer adapt and adjust
to the customers in the store?
Say by, opening more checkout queues,
optimizing the design of the store,
or sending someone to help you exactly when you needed it.
I would bet less frequently than you'd like, right?
But why?
Well, it's simple.
Unlike with the online experience,
the retailer simply does not have a scalable way
to understand the in-store customer behavior
that can drive these types
of optimized customer experiences.
But it's 2022, isn't it time we fix that?
Marks & Spencer thought so.
As a forward-looking successful British retailer,
with 15,000 stores globally, they wanted to do exactly that.
They began partnering with Microsoft,
as we developed our Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces solution.
Over the years, they've not just used,
but also pushed the solution to the next level.
Let's take a look at what they've achieved.
Marks & Spencer wanted to know peak visiting hours,
checkout queue length and time in the queue,
customer engagement with displays and promotions,
and how well those displays are performing.
With Connected Spaces,
they have answers to every single one of those questions
and they can use that information
to deliver a great in-store customer experience.
So how does it work?
Connected Spaces has been built from the ground up
with customer privacy, security,
and convenience at the heart.
Let's start with convenience.
Connected Spaces uses the cameras
Marks & Spencer already has.
There is no need for expensive, new, or specialized cameras.
It's just a matter of connecting their existing cameras
to an Azure Stack Edge gateway, and they're ready to go.
It's very, very simple.
With the stores cameras connected,
we then choose one of the built-in skills.
Each skill will help Marks & Spencer
understand a specific type of in-store behavior.
They follow a simple step by step configuration wizard.
This part of the process is fast and easy.
So Marks & Spencer will be generating insights in no time.
Next, let's talk about customer privacy.
This is arguably Marks & Spencer's top priority.
For both Marks & Spencer and Microsoft,
respecting the anonymity of their customers
is an absolute non-negotiable.
With the skills set up, Connected Spaces uses vision AI
to process and analyze the in-store video streams.
The customer interactions captured on the in-store cameras
are processed on the Edge,
meaning they're processed locally in the store.
Vision AI recognizes the difference
between people and other objects in the video feed.
And importantly, it has no need to store the video feeds.
No footage of customers ever needs to leave the store.
Connected Spaces simply analyzes the video streams,
creates anonymous insights and shares those
with store managers
who can review them wherever and whenever they want.
Marks & Spencer can be confident
that their customer privacy is deeply respected.
Let's see the reach analytics we've now unlocked.
First, store managers know exactly what's happening
with customer traffic.
They have access to concrete insights
that help them with their staff and labor planning.
When is there the most footfall?
When are the queues the longest?
When should we open more or less registers?
When is the best time to assign restocking tasks
that may otherwise impact the customer experience
in high traffic areas?
Shifts in staffing can now be planned
according to real data and real patterns in the store,
rather than guesswork or worse,
a reaction to a bad customer feedback or long queues.
As a customer walks into the store,
Marks & Spencer have anticipated how to staff the store
to help provide customers an optimized shopping experience.
Additionally, store and engagement managers
can immediately see the impact of advertisements
and other marketing campaigns
on the number of customers visiting that area of the store
or on the performance of certain products.
Is that wine of the month promotion
really driving more people to the wine area?
What actions do or don't have an impact?
Thanks to their efforts,
Marks & Spencer have bridged the data they have
from the digital and physical worlds.
Combining the behavioral data generated
through Connected Spaces
and the digital data from the point of sales, advertisement,
and marketing systems,
they've been able to gain a true understanding
of the effectiveness of their campaigns.
This helps them understand what customers are excited about,
what they wanna see more of,
how to optimize advertising spend,
how to optimize store placement, and ultimately improve ROI.
What's more is thanks to Power BI and Microsoft Teams,
this information is always available
at the fingertips of the store and engagement managers.
These insights ensure they're focusing their intention
where it counts on what their customers want.
We've seen how Marks & Spencer can accurately predict
the needs of their customer,
But despite the best insights, practices, and planning,
there will always be those exceptional days
where queues or foot traffic doesn't go as expected.
On those surprisingly busy days,
Connected Spaces acts as the store manager's loyal assistant
coming to the rescue at their time of need,
by monitoring conditions
like queue length or time at a display.
Connected Spaces can trigger
immediate actions and notifications.
The integration with Power Platform and Power Automate
ensures Marks & Spencer has the flexibility
to automate the most important actions
to support them in the moment, when it counts.
This could be a simple Team's notification
to the store manager,
when a certain queue length has been reached,
or it could be a more advanced process,
like leveraging staffing and expertise information
held in Teams and automatically notifying and dispatching
a wine specialist to the wine area,
where customers are spending more time there than usual
and could use assistance.
Altogether, Connected Spaces gives Marks & Spencer
the opportunity to anticipate customer needs,
making in-store shopping feel easy, fast, and considered,
just like online.
Back to you, Charles.
- Thanks, Alissa.
Alongside the finished Dynamics 365 applications,
the Power Platform provides
the world's leading low-code platform.
You can quickly build solutions
when there is no app for that.
Microsoft Power Platform includes
Power BI for data reporting and analytics,
Power Apps for creating web and mobile applications,
Power Automate for workflow and RPA,
and Power Virtual Agents for conversational experiences.
And because it is low-code,
the Power Platform empowers everybody in the organization
to be a developer.
Your whole company can now participate
in creating digital solutions.
And one of my favorite examples is Lauren Taylor,
who is the principal at Manitou Park Elementary,
part of the Tacoma school district,
right here in Washington.
Lauren found and taught herself how to use Power Apps,
and built an app to improve the reading assessment process
for students and educators.
This app is now being used across the entire school system.
Lauren is also using Power Automate
to automate manual processes,
giving her and her teachers
more time to spend with her students.
Let's hear from her.
(lively music)
- My name's Lauren Taylor.
I am the principal at Manitou Park Elementary.
Last year, I was the assistant principal,
and during that time I came across Power Apps.
The very first app that I created was our reading app.
That's really what sparked kind of a lot
of the ingenuity in realizing,
okay, I can use this for lots of different systems.
With COVID, this school year is one like no other.
Teachers needed to submit their schedules
for working in the building
so that we could all follow health department guidelines.
And so, one suggestion that we were given
was a Word document that teachers fill out
and then they would email to the principal.
I saw so many emails in my inbox,
it almost terrified me.
I was looking on the Office 365 homepage
and I clicked on Power Automate.
And I thought, oh, this, this automates things.
Creating the approval flow in Power Automate
has saved us time.
Success for us is even in a pandemic,
starting with remote learning,
our babies are going to learn.
There's going to be student growth.
The principal role is kind of a catchall.
Anything that needs to be done,
you get in there, and you do it.
I'm often asked, do you consider yourself a developer?
And I always say, no, I'm an educator,
however, I am developing apps.
I will leave it at that.
- Such a great story that shows how everyone
can use the Power Platform to have an immediate impact.