Jenny Clark
HqO Tenant Engagement Specialist
Jenny Clark joined HqO in 2020 as a Tenant Engagement Specialist to help HqO’s dedicated services team create world-class workplace experiences. Prior to HqO, Jenny held positions in marketing, and she draws upon this experience to write and create content as well as collaborate internally and externally with all stakeholders.
You have a really important and unique role here at HqO. What does your day-to-day look like?
My day-to-day routine varies depending on the time of the month, year, or day of the week. However, one of the main things that I do on a daily basis is create custom content for our clients in the HqO Workplace Experience App. This content can be static, such as building information and waivers, or more dynamic like event information and RSVPs that encourage people to register for different experiences.
Other things I do include writing and scheduling in-app messaging for the properties I work with, typically in the form of push notifications and email templates. I help with marketing collateral such as posters and PDFs for our clients, as well as postcards and banners for our clients to engage tenants on-site or digitally. And, finally, I submit support tickets for product bugs that we come across in our back-end platform.
That seems like a lot of moving parts – how do you coordinate these activities with our clients?
It is! I participate in frequent client calls, where we talk about recurring monthly content, custom content, and what’s going on at their building in terms of COVID-19 and foot traffic. We discuss occupancy as well as general industry trends to get a feel for their current needs.
Within our monthly content schedule, I primarily work on our strategy for giveaways in the app. For those, we’ll brainstorm and plan what each monthly giveaway series will be, then we draft the content, build it out in our platform, and send it to end-users. The giveaways vary frequently; sometimes they are daily, sometimes weekly, but we try to coordinate the prizes based on what time of year it is and the trends we’re hearing about.
When you are creating content for the app, is it primarily based on what you hear from clients, or ideas your team comes up with on its own?
Great question, it’s definitely a mix of things! Sometimes we get ideas from our team doing research on what’s popular right now with our customer base of professionals in the workplace.
We also collect feedback from our end-users. As part of the giveaway flow in the app, there is an optional question at the end that asks for people’s feedback. A lot of times we get suggestions there, so we’ll take them into account when creating new content. The property teams that we work with also often have ideas that we implement, so it’s really a mix of influences.
That’s awesome. Who do you find yourself working with the most?
The number one team I work with is our Customer Success (CS) team. We partner with CS on the post-launch product life cycle, so that after a building launches we work in lockstep with them indefinitely. We partner on daily tasks and attend client calls together, and do a lot of our planning for different accounts together. Another team I work really closely with is our Implementation team, on everything from onboarding our clients to launching buildings. We coordinate with Implementation on any integrations that we have. Our Ritual integration is a great example of this.
We also work really closely with our Product team. We keep in touch about any updates to our Workplace Experience Platform and help them test new functionalities.
That’s great, I didn’t know that you worked with the Product team so closely, but it makes a lot of sense when it comes to understanding our clients’ needs.
Yes, we’ve really been striving to cultivate that closer relationship with Product so that we can really understand all aspects of our product, effectively communicate that information back to our clients, and see what we can do for them to improve their experience.
It’s so important. Can you tell me about a project that you’ve worked on that has really excited you?
The number one thing that I’ve been most excited about working on is giveaway planning and structuring. It’s changed so much in the past year since I’ve started working on it, in terms of the end-user flow and making it an easier process to enter the contests. Brainstorming the actual prizes and customizing it to each property has been really exciting, because it’s quite fun and changes frequently.
In conjunction with that, it’s been exciting to gather and codify all of our end-user feedback. I’ve been working on cleaning up the data we get so that we can effectively share it externally with our customers and property teams. This has been really exciting because we are able to show them what tenants at their buildings are saying about their experience, app, and sponsored programming. It’s so important to know what people like and don’t like, and the feedback we get on giveaways is oftentimes more geared towards the overall app experience.
We’ve received some great testimonials from users that explain that they came to the app to enter a giveaway, but also ended up signing a waiver and checking out an additional feature in the app. It’s been really cool to hear from the actual end-users and learn from these testimonials first-hand.
Hearing that direct feedback is really important to not only understanding the impact of your work but also to improving our product in the future. Can you share any examples?
Yes! In response to a recent volunteer opportunity, we got some really positive feedback from participants:
“Very cool. Thanks for making it easy and providing a human connection!”
“This was an awesome experience. Thanks for making my morning with this activity and giving me a chance to step out of my daily bubble to think of someone else.”
That really speaks to the success of the experience! Have our landlord and property team clients told you that this feedback has been helpful for them to inform their technology investments?
Definitely. One client was so excited about this project that they shared all of the testimonials with all of their property teams. Overall, I’ve heard super positive feedback on the project. Our clients believe in the product, and hearing it directly from their tenants themselves is a really powerful thing.
Because of this, I codify the feedback alphabetically by the landlord and building so that the information is super easy to find. I share the data internally with our CS team as well as our clients so that they are able to pull any quotes that they want from that document.
Tell me about what it has been like to work with clients that are adapting to hybrid work schedules and trying to meet everyone’s needs.
The variety of clients that are going back to the office and the changes in foot traffic have been really interesting, because I’ve gotten to see the way that our app can work for so many different scenarios. Certain functionalities are essential for working in-office, but we also have the ability to create a ton of content for a building that is remote if we need to.
Our programming is not just contests and local deals, but also important building information and updates. The app has basically served as a one-stop-shop for everything that they need to know about the process of coming back to the office.
Everything is changing so much in terms of the workplace, and when tenants are working at home or in the office our technology allows them to feel more connected to their co-workers. Honestly, a lot of the testimonials we get are thanking us for bringing some excitement into people’s work day. Simple giveaways can seem insignificant, but these little things can make such a difference.
Are any of our customers using our product in a particularly innovative way?
Yes! Some of our clients are really using the platform to its fullest; they have built out their app to give users not only basic building information, but have gone above and beyond to create tons of content themselves. We offer a lot of national deals, but these clients connect with local retailers, source their own deals with them, and highlight them in the app.
I have one client who tries to do a monthly giveaway by herself, and always gets her prizes from local businesses. The teams that localize their apps have really found their niche because it’s customized and helps build a community. In turn, they’re able to create more loyalty and bring people back to the app.
When our clients implement their own unique ideas, like nominating an Office MVP or highlighting pet photos on National Pet Day, it gets people really excited and we see a lot of users coming back to enter in these fun contests and activities.
From working at HqO, what themes have you seen that you think are particularly important for the real estate world?
Generally, retail and transit are really important themes because they encompass things that apply to all aspects of our daily lives. Mobile access has also been one of the biggest changes to the commercial real estate (CRE) space: being able to hold your phone up to a reader and enter a door has been something that our customers are really asking for and definitely makes us stand out.
Health and fitness is another popular theme I’ve seen, whether from our integrations with different fitness providers or highlighting virtual fitness classes. Our number one most popular giveaway in 2021 so far had a fitness-related prize, which really demonstrated the growing popularity of fitness and health offerings.
How do you think workplace experience technology is shaping the workplace?
Workplace experience technology builds a sense of community. We all go to work every day and spend a majority of our week with our co-workers. Having these different ways for people to meet each other and engage in collaborative activities helps develop a sense of community that is really important.
The technology, in and of itself, enables connections. Before, tenants would only receive information through emails, newsletters, or physical signs at buildings. Workplace technology brings it to their fingertips and makes it easier for them to participate in the community, wherever they are. I think that’s vital.
It definitely brings a lot of clarity to building operations and helps foster communities where they couldn’t before. We apply these same culture-building strategies to working at HqO.
We do have an amazing company culture. Everyone that you work with, regardless of department or how long they’ve been here, has this similar dedication to what they do. Everyone is really driven and team-focused in the sense that you’re not just working as an individual, you’re working to help your co-workers and help the company any way that you can, which I think is a really unique experience.
It’s also so fast-paced; things are constantly changing and it’s super exciting. Having this team of amazing people behind you in this really exciting climate with this product that’s constantly changing and becoming better and easier to use, and developing more functionalities. It’s a really amazing job to have.
Inside HqO pulls back the curtain and introduces you to the people who make HqO the undisputed leader in workplace experience technology. For more information on how HqO empowers your office, click here. If you’re interested in joining Jenny and the HqO team, check out all of our current openings here.
