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Angela Byers
Welcome to Grow Your Business with Copilot for Microsoft 365, a monthly series designed to empower small and midsized businesses to harness the power of AI at work.
My team works with a wide range of small and midsized businesses. And while each is unique in their own way, we’ve found that regardless of size, industry, or market, they basically want the same thing: to grow . To attract more customers. To boost revenue. To scale efficiently.
But in many businesses today, people struggle to get the day-to-day work done. They don’t have the time and creative space to explore innovative ideas that unlock growth opportunities.
That’s where Copilot for Microsoft 365 can help. Companies are already using Copilot to unlock new opportunities to transform and grow their businesses.
For example, Joos, a small company based in the United Kingdom, is using Copilot to expand into North American and Europe.
An image from the company, Joos customer storyWorking big while staying small
Joos – a market leader in the power bank sharing industry – is using Copilot to boost their productivity and collaboration. By harnessing the power of Microsoft’s secure, comprehensive AI, they are growing their business faster than they otherwise could.
Joos supplies mobile charging stations, solving phone battery anxiety for users on the move. Customers can rent a power bank, charge their devices while on the go, and return it to any Joos station within the network. Since it was founded in 2018, Joos has expanded its reach into more sectors, including healthcare, transportation, retail and hospitality.
Joos, which has around 45 employees, adopted Copilot as a solution to help them improve efficiency without sacrificing innovation or customer engagement. Copilot is helping them work big while staying small!
Grow your customer base
For Joos, a major benefit of Copilot is boosting the productivity of their demand generation efforts. They’ve been able to use that time savings to initiate new ways to grow their customer base even further.
Dominic Comley, the Director of Global Operations, said that as Joos worked to expand the business, the team needed to pitch to new customers and foster relationships. Creating sales pitches, doing market research and creating new marketing materials took them several hours every week, because the team would customize the items within each sector they targeted.
One of the reasons that Joos chose Copilot for Microsoft 365 as its preferred AI tool is because they wanted a unified solution that integrated with the productivity tools their employees already used every day. They knew that Copilot could take their productivity to the next level.
A screenshot of Copilot in PowerpointJoos employees immediately started using Copilot in PowerPoint to create branded sales pitches. They use quick content editing and rephrasing to keep each presentation feeling unique and add branded elements automatically rather than searching through asset libraries.
Jeannette Ikonga, Head of Client Success & Customer Experience, said Copilot helps their company be more productive in their marketing efforts.
“Being such a small team, we don’t have a dedicated marketing department. We all pitch in to take on that role,” she said. “Having Copilot link to our SharePoint makes it so much easier to draft marketing articles, press releases and social media content.”
Ikonga said Copilot also enables Joos to expand their marketing efforts further to help grow their business. It helps with outreach to prospective customers in new industries by helping employees research those industries and clients in a fraction of the time it took before.
“If I’m crafting a sales page for hospitals, I can ask Copilot for the pain points in particular environments, and it will search the internet for me. It’s helping me do research and create my presentations at the same time,” she said.
Collaborate more efficiently
Joos’ 45 employees are spread out across Europe, North America, Ghana and China. One of their main challenges is working across time zones, since some team members are 13 hours apart, Comley said.
To accommodate the gap in time zones, Joos employees took detailed meeting notes so colleagues could stay up to date without joining every meeting. However, because of the team’s small size, senior employees often had to manually take the notes themselves, which is not always the best use of time.
“We rotated writing minutes between employees,” said Comley. “But when it’s your turn, you’re not able to participate as effectively when you’re concerned with getting all that information down.”
Now the team uses Copilot in Teams to quickly generate meeting summaries, suggest action items and summarize chat conversations. This has been a major asset in improving meeting productivity and collaboration at Joos.
A screenshot of Copilot in TeamsIkonga said the integration with Copilot in Microsoft Teams has been a massive game changer for collaboration and sharing across the company.
“The fact that Copilot quickly generates meeting recaps with notes and action items has actually changed the way we structure our meetings,” she said. “We can review the recaps and see where we’ve veered off topic, so we’ve streamlined our agendas to be more effective and skip over the redundancies.”
After the meetings, the team uses the automatic translation function to localize those meeting recaps into other languages. They previously had relied on a manual transcription service that was time-consuming and often inaccurate.
“Being able to immediately communicate with our team in China, without hiring a translator, is a great benefit,” Comley said.
Since implementing Copilot, Joos has significantly improved team collaboration and efficiency. The company is actively working on its expansion across North America and Europe.
“Since Copilot helps us communicate so well across time zones and languages now, we have a foundation for expanding into Canada,” said Comley. The framework with Copilot is helping them foster a team among French-Canadian speaking Canadian customers and co-workers, he explained.
Companies on the grow!
The productivity benefits of Copilot enable the small team at Joos to shift their focus from routine tasks to new efforts that help them expand their business. Just like Joos is all about powering people on the go, Copilot gives them the power to fuel their productivity, creativity and collaboration amidst its global expansion.
We are so excited to see Joos and other small and medium companies harness the power of Copilot to grow! Tune in next month for another example of how Copilot helps unlock more value and opportunity. If your company has used Copilot for Microsoft 365 to grow and you’d like to share your story, we’d love to feature you! Comment below to let us know you're interested and a member from our team will get in touch!
An image with the text "Take Action for Your Own Business"Want to try out some of the ways Joos used Copilot for Microsoft 365? Check out the following resources:
- Learn how to use Copilot in marketing
- Use Copilot to build a customized pitch
- See how Copilot works alongside you in PowerPoint
- Make your meetings more efficient with Copilot in Teams
Check out some of these additional resources to learn more:
- For the latest product news follow What’s new in Microsoft 365 Copilot blog
- For adoption content visit Microsoft 365 Adoption - Get Started
- For the latest SMB AI insights follow Microsoft 365 blog
Coming soon: We're introducing a weekly Copilot productivity tips series just for YOU!
Angela Byers
Microsoft
Senior Director, Copilot & Growth Marketing for SMB
An image of the SMB Copilot team at Microsoft, with Angela Byers, Elif Algedik, Kayla Patterson, Briana Taylor, and Gabe HoContinue reading...