Customer Roadshow

[Title: Your Business optimised. Telstra logo and Telstra Purple logos 

Your Business Optimised Customer Roadshow. Optimise The Frontline Worker. ] 

Samuel Baker: Hey, welcome, everyone. 

Thank you for joining the Optimised, sorry, The Frontline Worker breakout session today. 

Oh, this is not working. 

My clicker is not working. 

There we go. 

Now we're back on track. 

[SLIDE: Our Panel]  

Hey, I'm Sam. 

I'm from Telstra. 

I'm joined today by Sally from Microsoft and Martin from Samsung. 

And today we're going to cover a bit more around frontline worker and the tools that are available to really optimise how people can work in the frontline. 

I'll jump into a video just to give you a bit of an idea of, you know, who frontline workers are today. 

It's certainly changed over the last number of years. 

[VIDEO PLAYING] 

[VIDEO NARRATION: Whether you're a new hire or a seasoned employee, what you know is what the business knows and you need tools that make it easy to talk with the right people at the right time. 

Be onboarded onto new roles and upskilled in a current one because your knowledge helps the business, not just meet your goals on the front line but exceed them. 

Your voice provides on the ground insights and actionable ideas that make the business run better, and your abilities are what gets the job done wherever you may be. 

Your knowledge is the company's knowledge. 

On the front line, you are changing the way work gets done, and Microsoft is here with tools to help, so you don't just embrace the new frontline, you improve on it.] 

[SLIDE: Frontline workers make up 80% of most organisations] 

Samuel Baker: What I thought was really interesting is that 80% of our workers are Frontline. 

I think traditionally we probably thought of Frontline as maybe a postie, so maybe in aged care or in retail. 

But that number and the different types of roles have really changed over the last number of years. 

[SLIDE: Frontline workers face a varity of challenges and lack access to key resources] 

And we all have a stat in IT. 

But I think what's really interesting here is the sentiment. 

So when interviews are being done with people in frontline, the comments are things like we want to have better tools to engage with the business. 

You know, we're looking to how we can use tools to be more efficient in the workplace. 

But also if those tools aren't provided, sometimes we see this a lot, is that tools are found that may not be approved. 

And so, you know, IT security might be affected or a customer experience might be affected by not having the right tools. 

And in the past, delivering and answering a bunch of these different demands have been a lot more difficult. 

So it might have taken a customised application that you needed to develop and then push out to all the mobile devices and test, and that might have been difficult, but also quite expensive. 

The devices that that needed to work on might have been challenging as well, might have been a big heavy device in frontline. 

And so with something like Teams, Sally is going to go through a demonstration of Teams but with Teams there's a lot more that you can do now with that application and with other tools and applications being embedded into Teams which means when you're trying to deploy that out to your fleet of devices, that it's one application, not multiple. 

But Sally, I'll hand over to you to run through the demonstration. 

Sally Fahey: I'm always curious to know when I'm talking to a group of people, like where do you come from, from your organisation. 

Previous slide that Sam had up really highlighted a couple of the kind of challenges. 

I like to think about something. It's like, what are the problems that we're trying to solve? 

[SLIDE: Work Trend Index Pulse Report: Key findings] 

On the previous slide, we saw issues of people feeling disconnected from their organisations, from feeling like their organisations don't value them, that they don't have the right tools that they need to do the job and, you know, they're going to go and find ways to do it. 

So I’m interested, a show of hands. Who identifies as being from the IT part of the organisation that you work for? 

So IT. 

Anyone from sort of like an HR people in culture kind of a role? 

No. 

Anyone from all the operations aspect where you're actually like up front and personal with the people that are working in these frontline roles? 

Yeah, fantastic. 

And we've got a few of you in the room. So the previous stats and the ones that you can sort of see on the slide here come from some of the research that we do, because I think it's always important before we try to solve a problem is to try and understand it. 

When we look at a challenge and in this case, it's how do we do more for people that work in frontline roles? 

There are some key themes that came out, and this piece of research was published last year. We can make sure you get a link to it. If you have co-pilot, it might do a lovely summary for you, but I'll do my best impression of co-pilot for you today by summarising it. 

The research found that frontline workers are at an inflection point. They've got more opportunities than they've ever had before. They're telling us that they don't feel connected to their organisation, but they do feel connected to their peers, the people that they work with on a day-to-day basis. So anyone that's looking at a communications perspective that's sort of looking at retention, those types of challenges, this is a big red flag. You know, people are telling us they don't feel connected to their organisations, but they do like the people that they work with. So we've got some good things to work with. 

They also tell us that optimism for technology is high. And I must confess, this one surprised me a little bit when it came out because and again, maybe reinforced when if you do things that you should never do, which is like read the comments on a public news site that I did earlier this year. One of our major supermarkets in Australia recently opened a fully automated distribution centre. And again, the comments were like, you know, the machines are taking over the jobs and this is terrible and what about all the poor people? Yet that organisation, they can't get people to do those jobs. 

And so we've definitely got a, I guess, a bit of a shift happening in our workplace that there are jobs that are undesirable. So it makes sense to apply technology to those jobs where we can to help ease the burden of people that work in those environments. 

They're also telling us that for a variety of reasons, they feel they don't have enough people to do the work that needs to get done. So this optimism comes from can we please, please automate things that are mundane and boring that we don't want to do, and can we make up for some of the shortfalls? 

In the Australian market, we've got some of the lowest unemployment rates than we've had certainly in my lifetime. And through COVID, we put that up as a lot of, well, we don't have the backpacking population that we had. And just this week, I saw an article saying, "backpackers are back?" And I'm like, their unemployment rates are still really low, so we don't have enough people to do the work that needs to get done. 

Does anyone else talk about, I guess, some anxiety that can come in if you simply put technology in place, but you don't train people and they're not clear on what the purpose of it is, then that's actually counter-intuitive as well. That can create anxiety. "If I don't learn the new tools and services, maybe I will lose my job." Or it can create points of frustration. "Too busy doing my job. I don't have time to learn this and do that." 

So, you know, we're certainly not advocating technology for technology's sake, but it certainly has a lot of potential when it's addressing a problem and it's given to people in a way that they know how to use it. 

That's enough slides from me. 

I'm going to do that wonderful thing of hope that I've made the right and appropriate sacrifices to the technology. Jim's going to bring up this screen for me. And apologies. I am wired today, which is why I'm staying on the spot. 

But before I open this, I'm really curious. How many of you use Teams on your mobile phone today? Yep. Maybe I should ask it the other way. Does anyone not do that? 

So I'm going to go ahead and open the Teams app. Now, second show of hands, whose Teams looks like this? Nobody. 

So what are we looking at here is what we've done we look at some of the challenges when it comes to people that work in frontline roles. And again, they cross a multitude of things, the right tools, the right services, the right security. And what we've done is created an ability to bring different applications and services into a single application. What that does is it makes it easier for the person that's got to use them to find them and engage with them and interact with them, and anyone from a technology perspective it makes them more secure to access them and it makes them easier for you to manage. Instead of having to deploy five, six, seven different applications to a person, they can just have one. 

Because if you think about it, before a person even does any work and you can see some examples here, they're going to have likely some type of workforce management tool because they're often going to be working in shifts. They're going to want to know that they're getting paid, so they're going to want to be interacting with a payroll-type system. They're going to be doing learning-type activities, and they're likely to have more than one learning management system that they need to engage with. That's certainly the pattern that we see. 

So there's lots of applications and services that people need to get access to before they actually even go and do any work. So what you're seeing here is the ability to bring these together. For the technologists in the room, these are adaptive cards, and we've got a lot of capability of being able to integrate with a lot of those systems. 

So, for example, if I'm looking at my shifts, I can do things like see what my next shift is. This can live in your workforce management tool as a single source of truth. But I'm able to do things here like swap my shift or offer it. Now, one of the biggest points of pain for frontline managers, particularly if they've got a lot of staff on-site, is the inevitable need to swap and change. So a workforce management, your shift schedule is a living, breathing thing. Now we've seen some great results of organizations that have made this available for people and two benefits. One, it's much easier for them to make shifts available so people can pick up extra work when they know that it's going. They don't need to be in a secret group somewhere and have the handshake to know when information is going. But you've also got the audit trail. 

But for the actual employee, the transparency is really improved. Frontline workers talk about wanting flexibility. They've got to go to a particular site and do the particular work. So flexibility can be offered to them in ways like how easy is it for you to know when and where you need to be or to swap a shift when life inevitably happens and you need to make changes to your schedule? So these are the types of things that can really improve the experience of the employee simply by making access to information that they have in other formats, sometimes still literally stuck on a wall on a piece of paper. So that's about how do we unlock that and bring it through. 

Now we can also do things like pull information from other systems. You know, payroll is a great one that some people are often interested in. This capability also extends to how can we use attributes about a person to get information to them that they need to know about? Here we look at the feed, and what this is doing is bringing in, and you can see, I've got some new posts, so we'll see what's coming through for me. This is news and information relevant to me based on things like what role am I in, what geography or what site do I actually work at. 

In this case, I can see things like I've got a video to watch, which is about a safety briefing. And so, video is a really powerful medium to communicate with people in frontline roles. You know, we're often dealing with people whose language is other than English and who don't necessarily like or are comfortable receiving lots of information in written format. And aside from that, being able to watch something in a video, your comprehension is increased. So I'll be able to simply watch this video directly here from my app. You can see I'm not opening something else. I don't have to jump out to another app and watch that video. It can improve my comprehension. I can get more understanding of the topic that's shared with me in a couple of minutes rather than what might otherwise be pages and pages of content. 

I can also see, for example, we're getting content coming through from comms. I'm getting updates on sustainability. We can have polls. In this case, someone wants to know what do we want to do with our corporate giving. So I can lend my voice to things and have my voice heard by doing things like voting. In this case, you know, I want to do things about food insecurity. So I can add my votes and I can see what other people's votes are, those types of things. So again, a much richer way of being able to communicate and engage with people, taking into consideration the environments that they're working in and different styles and preferences for communication. 

The other things that we've built into this platform, and there are some that are specific to people that work in frontline roles, the same way that being able to use video is a really rich way for a communicator to be able to get a message across. Often we're looking at ways for how can we communicate without needing to text or write lots of information. 

So within the Teams platform, we've also built this push to talk capability that we call Walkie Talkie. What it does is it enables you to take a channel in a team and it can be used as a walkie-talkie channel. So what that means is you're immediately eliminating a potentially the need for a second device. You don't need to have a private or a licensed frequency for it to be private. You can only join the channel if you're a member of the team and you can also remove the element of geography. I could be in a walkie-talkie channel with someone who's on the other side of the planet. I could also be in a walkie-talkie channel with someone who's sitting beside me in the room. 

So what this does is increase the transparency of the conversation. We're being able to see who's there. And so if I were trying to talk to someone and they're not responding, I can see are they actually even listening at the time. 

And obviously, we're here with Samsung today. One of the great things about the Samsung devices and the partnership that Microsoft and Samsung have is we've made it such that, and I won't turn my screen off 'cause you'll have nothing to see. But Samsung devices have a programmable button. That means that you can trigger a walkie-talkie conversation when the screen is locked simply by using the button on the side. So you connect to the channel, and then you can go away and just sort of be talking to the person, and they can hear it. Otherwise, again, you've got the experience of if I wanted to talk, I can, you know, push down the button and hold, and it will come out the other device as well. 

So we have built experiences specifically for people that work in frontline roles, really aimed at how do we help improve their ability to engage with their work, but also to engage with their peers and build that sort of sense of connection as well. 

So that was just designed to be a, I guess, a short overview of some of the sort of experience. 

Hopefully you're getting an idea that the Teams that you can extend to your frontline workers can be very different to that that you use for people at work in your knowledge space as well. 

So with that. 

Yeah. I think I'll pass it to Sam.  

Samuel Baker: Awesome. 

[SLIDE: Drive digital transformation to empower your workforce with the right tools to get the job done] 

So I think, you know, if you've seen what Teams can do, I know in the past, to achieve all those different functions could have been, you know, ten, 15 different types of applications that you would have had to have tested, pushed out through a UEM to devices, make sure that they've all received the update, you know, go through security, and they're all typically going through their own versions of updates as well. 

But this makes it so much more simple from a, and I'm talking to IT at the moment, for you to manage that things have become a whole lot easier. 

Martin, I'll hand over to you. We're going to go into a bit more detail about one of the devices, specifically the Samsung that you just saw now. 

So we're going to go into a bit more detail. So stay with us. 

If you've got any questions, please sing out. We've got a microphone here. We can answer any questions on the fly. 

Martin Brown: Thank you very much indeed, Sam. 

So, you know, Sam and Sally, they've both articulated really the importance of technology and empowering that frontline workforce and really enhancing their wellbeing, what part do we play in that? 

And really for us is about that endpoint. So it starts with, you know, giving those frontline workers a superior user experience, something they're familiar with, a very consumer-like experience on a rugged device. And I'll talk about that shortly because it is a whole category that was driven by our voice of customer globally. It wasn't something that Samsung thought was the right thing to do. 

The second one is around really providing that enhanced productivity. So if you're going to deploy technology to a frontline workforce that may have not had access to it before, you want to make sure it's something that's simple but user friendly. You know, simplifying those workflows, you'll get the highest take-up. 

I'll talk about reduced cost of ownership. We're certainly seeing with the organizations we're talking to this thing called device convergence. We're using a device like this as a platform of which upon you can layer software solutions to remove kind of legacy hardware from that environment and provide all that capability on one device. 

And then finally, we know that security is one of those top concerns for any business in Australia and you want to protect that endpoint around the security solutions from both Microsoft and Samsung, enhancing that security experience for the user and the organization. 

And it all starts with this endpoint. 

[SLIDE: Rugged devices support more productive, user-friendly work] 

So this is what Sally showed you is the Xcover 6 Pro. It's one of our, what we call our business-first rugged range that Telstra has in the market. So we've got the Xcover 6 Pro and there are two rugged tablets, also an 8 inch and a 10.1-inch. 

But again, as I said, these devices were built by the voice of customer globally. 

And the problem that we're trying to solve, 

I kind of go back to when we first released one of these devices seven years ago, our customers had two choices. They had the traditional rugged device, typically very expensive, very clunky, very heavy, or at the other end of the spectrum, you had one of our consumer devices in a rugged case, and neither scenario was perfect for that kind of frontline worker. You'd either get high failure rate with the consumer device in that rugged case where you got temperature variance, humidity, or on the other end of the spectrum with the rugged device because of the cost, it was always a shared model. So not everybody could get access to the technology. 

And so really what we provided was something that was very kind of flagship like in terms of its kind of look and feel, but just again, a broad range of capabilities you don't see in our consumer devices. The first of these is that all of these devices, what we call mil-spec. So this is an external global accreditation to kind of assess the durability and ruggedness of a device. So they all have things like certified drop rating, quite wide temperature variance in terms of - and + temperatures way beyond what you get with our consumer devices. 

They have a really nice feature called glove mode. So we can change the sensitivity on these devices and allow those frontline workers. We know this is important in those environments where they're wearing PPE, they can still interact with the touch screen. Again, something you can't do very easily with our consumer devices. And that became super relevant, you know, during the COVID era where everybody had to kind of wear PPE in those environments. 

On that note, the other thing you can do is you can sanitize these devices. These are really popular in our healthcare space and you can sanitize them with things like medical grade sanitization products. Again, something we would never recommend on our consumer devices. 

Sally showed you the programmable button. And that can be used for things like walkie talkie. We've also got a partnership with, I guess, the global leader in Smart Data capture. Where it utilises the cameras on these devices to be able to capture barcode information. But because it's using the camera, it can do some very, very clever things. You know, capture ten barcodes at once or provide the end user through use of technologies like augmented reality, actual visual feedback on what they're scanning. 

Now as Sally mentioned, you know, the walkie talkie. 

[SLIDE: Communicate in real time with Walkie Talkie] 

You know, we utilise that Xcover button. Again, we've got a very deep partnership with Microsoft globally around Frontline solutions. Ensuring that we're optimising that Microsoft platform for devices like the Xcover Pro. And again, when you come back to you're deploying technology like this to frontline workers, you want to make sure the experience is as seamless as possible. 

With our Knox platform, we can take advantage of that button so you physically don't have to turn on the screen, touch on all the screen to initiate that conversation. The application can be running in the background and you can still have that conversation with any of your peers across the business. 

Again, it's just as simple as holding that button. You can see the screen is off and I'm having that conversation. So again, a really nice piece of integration with that Microsoft platform and our Knox solution as well. 

But its own. 

[SLIDE: Replace extraneous hardware with a single device that meets all your business needs and lowers TCO].  

And I talked about this device convergence. So really, this model we kind of first saw this it came out of certainly the US, Walmart, the world's largest retail employer, over 1.2 million employees. Again, you know, when you come back to that initial, you know, work trend index report about the importance of technology. 

And this was an organisation that had, I guess, there was a number of impacts around not having the right technology for their workers. Walmart made an investment a few years ago of giving every single one of those employees all 1.2 million of them, access to one of our rugged devices with a suite of applications to allow them to be far more productive, to serve the customer better, to train quicker. So again, a really, really powerful use case. 

[SLIDE:  345% return on investment (ROI) from deploying Microsoft Teams for frontline workers”] 

Don't take our word for it. I recommend you read this Forrester Consulting last year, did a very detailed survey around the impact of frontline organisations that had utilised that Teams environment that Sally showed you earlier. Really, really insightful because it's across multiple industry verticals. The key thing that came out was that every company that had implemented that Teams environment had realised some benefits. So whether it was, you know, getting time back in the day from access to the right information, reducing errors in the business from lack of misinformation or improved productivity by providing a better experience to the customer because they had access to the right information to perform the job more effectively. 

[SLIDE: Provide enterprise-grade security and compliance across hardware and software] 

And I'll kind of round off here. I guess a couple of things are around I mentioned security. It's always one of those top three for any organisation around those security concerns. I guess hands up in the organisation are the people in the room here. Who uses tools like WhatsApp for communication within their environment? Got a few show of hands again. Not the most secure platform in terms of kind of corporate communication. We've seen, you know, these tools being used in things like clinical settings where, you know, very confidential patient information is being shared on that platform. What we're seeing is kind of remove those security barriers and concerns, implement an environment like Teams where you're getting the highest level of security and compliance. 

[SLIDE: Provide enterprise-grade security and compliance across hardware and software] 

And then finally on our Samsung Knox. This is our security environment. Again, we work very closely with Microsoft, and it's very, very tightly integrated with the Intune platform, taking advantage of things like our Knox Service plugin and making that whole experience very seamless for the EMM manager. 

With that, I'll leave it. I'll hand it back to Sam to wrap up. 

Samuel Baker: No worries. 

Thank you. 

Awesome. 

[SLIDE: How do I start?] 

So some of you might have seen some things here today that you've said, great, we're ready. We want to go and implement that, and everything's OK. You can go and do that. Some of you might be thinking, we want to do something, but we're not quite sure where to start. That's something that we can help with. 

So myself, I have pulled together what we call a mobile maturity assessment.  

[SLIDE: MMA Current and Target State] 

We actually look at 11 different categories in your organization and really try and extract where are you today in terms of your mobile environment? The guys are sick of hearing me say that I think mobile devices live and breathe inside of your organization because they're constantly changing, operating systems are changing, you know, and sometimes that's not in your control. So understanding where you are today and where would you like to get to in the future? But also really importantly, what things do you need to focus on immediately? So deploying the technology might be one thing you'd love to do, but is there a strategy? Are the policies up to date? Is the appropriate governance in place? These types of things that aren't just necessarily related to the technology deployment. 

And often we want to do these things and we see that there's benefit, but we can't just do them by ourselves in IT. It needs, you know, support from whether it's operations or human resources, OH&S, etc. 

This exercise is something that we do relatively quickly, over two hours to extract this level of information.  

[SLIDE: Frontline workshops. Register now] 

Once we've extracted this level of information, there are other workshops that we can support you with that are structured and they've got a defined set of things that we'll cover and a defined outcome, which I think is really, really important. It's not a choose your own adventure. 

So a field worker discovery, you can imagine how important that is. We have an idea. We think that we can be more efficient or we'd like to deploy x, but we need to go and spend some time with our field workers to understand what they're doing. And I had a really good example a number of years ago. 

An organization in logistics said, look, we go past a lot of houses all the time and we think with these new devices we can do our normal job but also do meter reading. We thought, Oh, that is actually a really good idea. You can, you know, do two things. You can sell that capability. 

And a high vis guy in the back of the room put his hand up and said, Hey, but if we do that, will that take us double the time to do, you know, deliver the parcel? And so you can think to yourself, hang on a second, that was a great idea, but actually it's going to take twice as long to do the thing that we're here to do. So going through these types of exercises is really, really important. 

We're actually understanding exactly what you're trying to do and is it going to be effective? Is it going to be efficient? Is it worth investing money in? 

We also have a cyber security assessment. 

So again, multiple devices in your environment that might be on different operating systems. We have the ability to look at the Australian Cyber Security Centre and what their guidelines are and measure. Do you have an environment that is healthy? And again, that's not just about the technology that you have deployed, but it might be, you know, are the policies up to date? Are compliance settings in place? And again, that's not just the technical side. 

And then a Microsoft Intune readiness assessment. So you might have all the other elements there. You want to go and do something you want to deploy, but it's just understanding what things you might need to do. There might be an additional license. There might be an additional configuration that needs to be put in place. 

[SLIDE: Q&A] 

So with that, I might open up to the audience, see if we've got any questions. Not just for me. Yeah, I might have grabbed my microphone. Oops. Not that one. Not that one. 

Audience: Thank you for the presentation. My name is ShiJi. I'm working for a not-for-profit organization. We run aged care, we run homeless housing, things like that. So there's a lot of frontline workers, and we do use Microsoft, and we use E5 as well, so because you give us a great price for not-for-profit, and we all use Samsungs. So a lot of technology adds up, but we don't have the capability to do your home page, like to make it really easy for the front worker to actually look at the information. We have all those in the background, but we don't have the resources to implement it. So I guess the question is for Sally from that... Sally, right? From this perspective, how I reach out to Microsoft and give some sort of how we can get some support or even your partner to actually just use the tools properly. 

Sally Fahey: Yeah. 

The best way if you've got a Microsoft account team is to reach out to them. But I'm happy to grab your details afterwards and have a chat and help you with how we do that. So we do have programs and things like standardized pilots to help you like bring in some of our partners to help you, 'cause you're absolutely right. When you look at setting something like that up, you want to be thinking about what's important to the people because particularly if you think of an environment like that, you're likely going to at least give them the option to use their own devices. So if they're going to do that, what would be the incentive? What's actually in it for the individual? 

So, you know, working with a partner, they'll help you understand, you know, what makes the most sense and then what's the path to go through. Some of the applications and services that you use we already have likely existing connections and so they'll be able to guide you with what's there out of the box. But if they need to build a connection or something, you know, what's going to be involved in doing that. But I'm happy to grab your details afterwards and help you with how do you navigate that part because I appreciate that's the hard part. The technology is great, but how do you make it real? 

Yeah. 

Samuel Baker: Any other questions? 

OK. 

Audience: Yeah. Microsoft-related question for Teams. And yeah, thanks for sharing as well. Just sort of what's next for Teams and frontline workers in it, like what's coming up in the next couple of years, or was there a bit of a roadmap? 

Sally Fahey: There is, and we can do depending on your organisation. We do love to have conversations about roadmap. But some of the things that I can share, obviously. 

One of the things that we very much focus on from Teams is that it's, you know, it's an app in itself, but it's very much an extensible platform. So we are continuing to build partnerships with a number of, let's say, organisations that are very active in terms of the applications that they provide into frontline workers. So we have existing partnerships with the likes of UKT Dimension, with Blue Yonder, with Reflexus. 

You'll see some of those extend and there'll be more of those added. We also continue to develop some of the, I guess, the capabilities that you see around that dashboard and specifically making an experience out of the box for you to do Frontline. 

So the question here of how do we start? There's a lot of the building blocks are there, and so we're doing a lot of work to make it even easier for you to get started. 

So we're very focused around, again, we go by what our customers tell us that they want and we get a lot of interest and expectations from organisations going, we need to be able to communicate with people more efficiently, more effectively. 

Any organisation or anyone who's involved in any type of change program knows communications is first and foremost. So there's a lot coming in that, how do we make that easier for you to execute out of the box? 

And then things like how do we make it easier for you to have multiple versions of it for your organisation because that's addressing the need where, you know, you might need a different solution. People working in technology roles, but they're still mobile. You might have multiple brands under your umbrella. So we've got a lot of things coming down from that perspective. 

You keep going. We're developing in the tasking area, so, you know, being able to do a lot more in terms of how you're communicating work that needs to get done in things like the walkie talkie capability, being able to do things like listen to multiple channels at a time. 

So there are all the types of things that are sort of coming in the pipeline in the next sort of 12 months on a time frame. But again, I could talk a long time about that one, but there's a lot more coming. 

Samuel Baker: I think if you think about five years ago, you know, we weren't even using Teams really, and what it looks like now that five years has been pretty incredible. 

So next five years is gonna be, yeah, whatever you can imagine. 

Next question. 

Sorry. 

Audience: Thanks very much. The biggest barrier to entry, I think, for medium level and upwards companies who have a couple of thousand frontline workers is the ability to license themselves through Microsoft for Teams only at a decent price. And also question for including Samsung is the ability to also give devices to everybody. 

So is there an efficient way or is there a more efficient way than what is currently in place, which is probably the F1 license coming through Microsoft to be able to license people to Teams at a lower cost? And can larger companies go direct to Samsung to talk about their device needs? 

Sally Fahey: I'm going to talk about the Microsoft bit. 

Martin Brown: Yeah. 

Yeah, I mean, we're a channel organizations. We kind of, you know, work through our channel partners, of which obviously Telstra is one of the significant partners. So we don't sell direct to customers, particularly with those large volumes, unfortunately. 

Audience: Thank you. 

Microsoft. 

Sally Fahey: Licensing, as anyone who knows me, is one of my least favorite topics, like the dark arts. You almost need a degree to understand Microsoft licensing. What I can tell you is depending on how long ago you looked at the licensing, because when we bought out our frontline licensing is probably only two or three years ago, we really only had one kind of construct. 

And so if you looked at it then, we have certainly changed it. And what we do is we very much try to appreciate, you know, what are you going to need for your employee? So we now have multiple different types of frontline licenses, some which include mailboxes and access to windows and power apps and some that are literally everything that I showed you today that don't use those because we're seeing it as that would be a profile of someone who's going to be on a mobile device. 

They don't need mailboxes. You know, they're not going to be logging into devices and those types of things. So we do have a bit in between. It's probably easier if I connect you with your Microsoft Team and see, you know, where are you at and have you seen the latest kind of offers that we have in that space as well because appreciate, you know, when you do have thousands of people that can scale quite quickly. 

But we have been very deliberate about putting something in the market that helps you just get that capability. To your question about Teams only, we deliberately don't do Teams only because what we find is as soon as you've got Teams, you're going to want to have access to SharePoint to share content or to even engage in some of those kind of communication tools because, you know, where's the content come from that they're engaging with? And also you're going to want to have an identity and those types of things. So we don't just do Teams, but deliberately because when we've looked at it in the past, everyone's like, oh yeah, but I want one of these or one of these. So we do put a few extra things in there as well for you. So even at the base level where you're still getting an identity and the ability for people to fill in surveys and forms and things because we get common kind of requests for it. So whilst I say it's a dark art, we do try to make it simple. And I know that anyone that deals with licensing is probably like I don't think we’re doing great. I know we're being recorded. But it is a tricky one, so I can have a chat with you afterwards as well. 

Samuel Baker: Great. Thanks. 

And I guess from the Telstra side of things we would also love to understand what those needs are. One of our big strengths is being able to operationalise costs. So bringing in the right device, the type of license and then working with you to how we could bundle that together to give you the outcome that you need.  

Martin Brown: There's a question at the back.  

Samuel Baker: Wait, was that one? Sorry. 

Audience: Another one for Microsoft. Just on the Teams and integration. With the EU you see Microsoft splitting out Teams from the Microsoft bundles. How will that go for the rest of the world? Because that plays back into the licensing conversations as well. So in European, in the EU, Microsoft are now splitting out Teams of the base office licensing or base office. You know, offering. So Teams has been seen as a standalone for anti, you know, competitiveness. So does that play into anything of offering it up as a separate entity?  

Sally Fahey: I’ve definitely not seen it split out as a separate like a license where you can buy just that.  

Audience: No, no. In the European to stop the anti-competitiveness, Microsoft are now splitting out in Europe, Teams as its own.  

 Sally Fahey: Yeah, I must confess that one's outside mine but I can take that on notice and grab your details and come back to you. But I'm not aware of that. So apologies. I can't answer that one today, but I'm curious. So I'm going to go and learn something as well for asking that question. So thank you. 

Audience: Well, senior demo took me back to my days of, you know, after-school job and working in retail and all that kind of stuff. And I love the ability to engage and get access to the stuff about my job, like my pay slip and how much annual leave I've got, which was always really tough, right? So from an employee perspective, great. But if I'm an ops manager or, you know, a head of a retail department, how do I ensure that what I'm providing is bringing value to productivity or it's not offsetting productivity and creating distraction? And conversely, can I use this to help me drive better productivity? So not just taking it one way, but I'm looking for improvements here too, right? 

Sally Fahey: What we see people looking for that driving the efficiency gain is consolidating some of the applications and processes that they have around it. If you've worked in retail, you could probably appreciate. There's still a lot of paper-based processes and checklists and different things, and so it's about digitizing and integrating those and then, you know, what insights does that unlock? You know, there's a great conversation going on next door around AI. You know, part of the challenge is how do you capture the information and what insights can you draw from it about the way people are actually working. So there's absolutely the, you know, how do you take things that are done manually today and digitize them? And again, not to kind of focus on retail, but you've put that example out there. You know, you've generally got a younger employee that's more native for them to be using technology to do their work, you know, sometimes can be a little bit of a disconnect. If you get someone who's grown up as a digital native and you put them in an environment and expect them to use pen and paper to do work. So there's a lot about matching a work style with a personal preference. But the biggest area we see is how are you able to take things like the tasking type activity and break that down, and by doing so, what you can do is start to integrate the instruction on how to do the task into the task. And again, you've got that efficient just-in-time knowledge of I'm doing this, hang on, do I know how to do it? Yes. Or is there video on how to do it there with it as well. So being able to sort of build more of a, I guess, a workflow around the work that's there to support the worker in what they need to do. And then, you know, we always get this question about, you know, trust be playing on their phones and what does that look like from a customer engagement perspective? You know, if the person is able to look up product information or find something for a customer and solve their problem, they can also have a positive impact on customer engagement. And then we have a lot of conversations around trust, and, you know, do you trust employees to do the right thing? 

Samuel Baker: Thanks. 

[SLIDE: Register now for your Mobile Maturity Assessment] 

So I think a lot of the questions that you've asked really relate to running a maturity assessment like it really understanding what do we need to find out? Is it worth doing? What do we need to change? And I think to your point, like a field worker discovery, you know, what are they doing? And if we did this, would it improve things? And that’s what these things are designed for. The maturity assessment doesn’t cost anything. That’s something that I would come and work with you on. You provide your report with all the responses, the answers. The idea is to help you develop a plan. To help you understand whether it is the right thing, or who needs to be engaged. These things aren’t going to just happen overnight. It’s not like a drop-down menu, like we want this many. So we absolutely understand that. 

I’m getting the wrap-up. 

[SLIDE: Get in Touch] 

Samsung has pulled together an offer. So if you saw these devices and thought, hey, they’re awesome. Can we get some? Absolutely. There’s an offer here today that Samsung would love to look after you. And Telstra. 

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