#Apple asks retail employees to work remotely as pandemic rages on

Apple is asking its retail employees to help serve customers from home as the coronavirus pandemic continues to make a full reopening look unlikely any time soon.

In a video recorded over the weekend, Apple’s retail chief Dierdre O’Brien encouraged employees to get comfortable helping customers over the phone.

“If your store is closed, please sign up for Retail at Home,” O’Brien said, according to Bloomberg. “We really need to make sure that we shift our teams to greet our customers remotely in this time.”

O’Brien noted that getting employees signed up for the program is important because some customers looking for Apple support are currently facing “significant” wait times to get on the phone with an Apple Genius.

“This is not the experience that we want to have for our customers,” O’Brien said. “So we really want to make sure that we are moving to where our customers are, to help them during this very challenging time. As you know people are really dependent upon their devices, especially right now.”

Apple first closed its stores in mid-March as the pandemic first hit the United States. It recently began reopening stores, but has been scaling back as the virus has continued to spread around the country.

For stores that remain open, O’Brien said that employees will soon be given badges that can be customized with their own memories — Apple’s cute cartoon avatars — to help make them more recognizable to customers while they wear their masks, according to the report.

Apple is also providing COVID-19 tests to its retail and corporate employees, allowing them to request that a test be delivered to their house. The workers can then have the test sent to a lab.

Shares of Apple were up 0.6 percent Tuesday morning, at $384.