This blog is co-authored by HqO’s Courtney Eastes and John Bosch of the Customer Success team
It all starts with a simple question: What is our purpose as a business?
HqO produces software, but is that our purpose, or just something we do? Ultimately, we want to catalyze the shift from a property-focused industry to a customer experience-focused industry. We also want to enable each traditional role within CRE to expand their focus from “asset management” and “property management” — which relates to an investment in a building — to “tenant experience,” expanding the focus to the humans that interact with and work within the buildings on a daily basis. By doing this — and by delivering a fantastic tenant experience — our customers in the real estate world will be able to attract larger customers, increase loyalty and brand recognition, increase the value of their assets, and ultimately improve their net operating income (NOI).
It is for this reason that HqO strives to drive a world-class customer experience, so that our customers can deliver a world-class tenant experience. With so many different factors to consider, how exactly do we help our customers achieve this success?
It’s actually quite simple. For most companies, “outcomes” is merely a buzzword. For us, it’s a science. Our dedicated Customer Success team has honed our skills to ensure that we do a better job in navigating the obstacles in the industry and customer pain points than anyone else. As suggested, all of our efforts start with our focus on defining business outcomes.
What is a “Business Outcome”?
“The [HqO] team has listened to our needs and understands our vision and culture. [..] We appreciate working with a very proactive team, and look forward to a long positive relationship.”
— Michael Dekrmnjian, Property Manager at Jamestown’s Innovation and Design Building
We understand that standardizing how we capture customer’s goals and how we achieve those goals is the key to success. Outcomes allow us to take ambiguous goals and break them down into metric-driven success criteria, therefore transforming any scenario into a clear, metric-driven definition of value to our customers. In short: business outcomes help us capture the “why” behind a customer’s motivation to implement tenant experience technology.
As one might imagine, outcomes come with many considerations — all of which we factor into our line of thinking. Below are the components of a successful, achievable outcome:
- A goal
- The business value of achieving that goal
- Buy-in from stakeholders at all levels of the organization
- A jointly agreed on process to achieve that goal based on combining our best practices from across our entire business with a deep understanding of the unique elements of each property and team we are working with.
Of course, not every goal is as defined from the start, and not every customer knows exactly what they want to achieve. Therefore, we take the time to sit down and listen to customer pain points early on in the sales process. This helps us meticulously extract information and formulate it into business outcomes based on customer needs for them, as well as to turn it into meaningful data that can prove value.
Leveraging A Dedicated Team
“HqO has been a tremendous partner as we continue to energize the Willis Tower neighborhood and create a world-class office workspace environment. From the very onset, HqO was willing and eager to listen and adapt to our needs. This approach continued into the pre-launch preparations with their entire team, who were all aligned in a collaborative approach in order to develop the very best product and experience. This momentum has lasted well past our launch and further improved now that we are seeking out and implementing new features, reporting, and improvements. HqO is a valued partner, helping us improve our customer’s experience, and I look forward to continuing a long relationship together.”
— David Moore, Senior Vice President at EQ Office
The other added benefit about HqO’s business outcome process is the power of a fully dedicated team backing every customer. It’s one thing to help customers organize their thoughts and give them outcomes, but it’s a whole other notion to be able to work side by side with people who can make the process enjoyable through any road bumps that may come up along the way.
Through our Customer Success team — which is broken down into Customer Success, Customer Support, and Tenant Experience experts — we hone in on and value each customer’s designated role and their specific needs. For example, a property manager may have different goals and outcomes than an asset manager. It’s our job to dive into the intricacies of their responsibilities, and to clearly define a trajectory to success for them. This includes the fact that we need to set up these goals to not only achieve the higher level (landlord) strategy, but to also achieve day-to-day goals at the property level.
We don’t just provide the baseline of customer support. Instead, each customer can take advantage of our focus on alignment, strategy, project and process management, and investing our resources to truly understand the customer’s business and enabling them to articulate the value of their investments in an eloquent way.
The Value of Our Approach
Our thoughtful approach to our customers can generate value for customers and their portfolios in many ways. Not only can we guarantee unique differentiation in a highly competitive industry through our technology solutions, but we can directly contribute to the following results:
- Creating amazing (and modern) digital and physical experiences for tenants
- Unifying and streamlining various tenant technologies into a single and easy-to-use platform
- Increasing overall tenant satisfaction
- Establishing a data-driven approach for CapEx and OpEx investments
- Opening a direct communication channel to all tenants
In fact, our expertise has led to several impactful pilots of our Tenant Experience Platform with some of our largest customers. These pilots were so impactful — such as is the case with Hudson Pacific Properties — that after realizing the true value of our technology and seeing our solutions in action, customers pushed for full version implementations of our end-to-end operating system for their properties. Through our platform, they now continue to provide remarkable workplace experiences and offerings for their tenants.
Remember, this is exactly our end-goal at HqO: to provide a world-class customer experience so that our customers can provide a world-class tenant experience.
Making it Count
At the end of the day, it is simple: at HqO, we hire great people that take the time to ensure that our teams can drive true value for our customers, which then enables our customers to create modern and engaging experiences among their portfolios. Not only can HqO customers lean on the support of an entire team dedicated to their success, but they also have the support of our company-wide resources to make sure their business outcomes are achieved.
As the commercial real estate industry continues to evolve, and new needs arise in the market, this attention to detail and level of customer support will be critical to any portfolio’s success. To learn more about our team and our operating system, check out our customer success stories today.
