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It’s easy for a business to say it puts customers first.
That’s expected, right? Without customers, you don’t have much.
We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about our customers—and we’re not talking about during the past month, or the past year. Putting our customers’ needs (and wants) first has been at the heart of HON’s research, innovation and development for decades.
It’s one of our core values: to walk in our customers’ shoes and return with ideas, inspiration and information that will help our teams develop the next great product—so they can help customers do better work.
Our work begins with understanding the customer: who they are, what they need and how we can leverage our depth of knowledge to help them. We focus on the individual user and how they interact with our products, then use that information to begin a comprehensive process to solve their problems.
“This is about gaining knowledge so our team members can put themselves in the customers’ shoes every time they’re thinking about doing something new or improving a process that we have,” said Jen Petersen, VP of Members and Brand for The HON Company.
Those processes are under constant evaluation, Petersen said, and she has challenged HON members to “write themselves into the customer’s story.” It’s an important step to further understand the customer, and step back from something our teams are close to in order to get a full picture.
“If (members) were the ones going through our process, what would the challenges be, and what are the opportunities for us as a company?”
“It helps our members really connect to the customer,” Petersen said. “If they take a step back out of HON’s world, they can start to make decisions and act like the customer when they’re doing things—which is a powerful way to think about it and prepare to solve problems.”
And when it comes to getting our message to partners and customers, HON takes a proactive approach to both listening and acting.
“We want to lead that (creative) conversation instead of follow that conversation, and get ahead of customer problems so we can better help our partners,” said Ben Daufeldt, Brand Marketing Manager for The HON Company.
Our product marketing managers are the engines for new ideas.
Sometimes, it’s about what a competitor isn’t doing—and other times, it may be about what HON can do better, said John Koch, Director of Product Development for The HON Company.
“To use the analogy of peeling the onion, for us it’s about empathizing and understanding what the customers are looking for and how to best address their needs,” Koch said.
One example is HON’s Cliq task chair, which launched in January. Our product marketing team identified the need for a simple and intuitive chair, one that could be paired cohesively with any product in the office. The focus was on simplicity and comfort for quick meetings and touch-downs; our team saw chairs in workspaces that hadn’t changed position since they were taken out of the box, a sign that some chairs weren’t user-friendly and perhaps too complex.
From that research, Cliq was born—and it’s helped people do better work and collaborate safely during uncertain times.
When we talk about HON’s “customer first” mentality and what that phrase means to our company, we could talk for days.
“We’re all in the business of satisfying customers, not just customer service.”
-Ryan Neff, Manager of National Customer Solutions
But nothing is truly customer-centric unless the quality of the experience meets the quality of the product. Our customer experience team works to understand the issues and then communicates the solutions to the end user.
Recently, a new quoting and ordering tool was rolled out to make it easier for trade partners to share updates and features of each product with customers, and also have insight into lead times and other order information.
“Everyone in the organization has some kind of role that impacts the customer experience in a positive or negative way; we must have a collective and experiential approach to being customer-first,” said Ryan Neff, Manager of National Customer Solutions for The HON Company.
“The experience is something we’re always thinking about, and always trying to refine and improve. How can we make the journey and the path to purchase better, or more valuable for the customer and for HON? It’s something we’re committed to throughout the company.”
Actions speak louder than words, but our words must also explain how we act. A key function of our “customer first” mission is how we communicate; this is a complex, often-overwhelming industry, and our goal is to make buying furniture easier.
Not only is it incumbent upon us to communicate what certain products are and how they’re beneficial to the customer, but also something as simple as how to submit an order.
We recently adopted “make your space work” into our communications, and it’s more than just a tagline. It’s a four-word statement about what HON products can help customers achieve.
“‘Make your space work’ means something very personal to every single customer who encounters that message,” Daufeldt said. “We have a cohesive energy across the company, and we have the ability to be relevant to every different customer and their needs.”
This approach, like many others at HON, is holistic; it’s an all-hands-on-deck effort across departments to ensure customers have access to the products and solutions they need, when they need them, as well as the information required to use those products best.
To learn more about HON’s products and solutions, or to connect with a member of our experience team, please visit hon.com.
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