Haworth is a leading global manufacturer of office furniture and workplace solutions. The family-owned company was founded in the United States in 1948 and is now active in more than 120 countries. With an extensive portfolio of office furniture, seating solutions, meeting spaces and acoustic solutions, they help organisations create inspiring and flexible working environments.
Haworth's customer service team did everything they could every day. But the tool they were using was never designed for what they were trying to do with it. Outlook is great for individual emails, not for managing hundreds of customer enquiries at the same time.
In a shared mailbox, a customer enquiry is just another email among hundreds of others. Who picks it up? Is someone already working on it? What has previously been agreed with this customer? Without a clear owner, confusion arises: two people respond to the same message, or no one does because everyone assumes a colleague will handle it. When someone is absent or goes on holiday, all that context disappears with them.
Management had no visibility into the workload of each team, response times could not be monitored and customer satisfaction was barely measurable. Valuable knowledge was scattered across shared mailboxes and stored in the minds of experienced employees. When someone left, that knowledge left with them.
We organised workshops with the key users from each team. Not to work through a wish list, but to understand how Haworth's customer service really works: which enquiries come in, how they are currently handled and where things repeatedly go wrong.
One principle kept coming back: keep it basic. No unnecessary fields, no screens that create more confusion than they solve. But simplicity does not always mean simple. Haworth operates globally across different markets, each with its own way of working. Some markets, such as the Benelux and Switzerland, share the same mailbox for both order processing and customer service. This required a tailored approach for each market, allowing every region to use the system in the way that works best for them.
We built a complete customer service environment on Microsoft Dynamics 365, tailored to the way Haworth operates across different countries.
Incoming emails from 26 mailboxes are automatically converted into cases and assigned to the right employee or team, based on the customer, the region the enquiry comes from or keywords in the email. No more manual sorting. Every case immediately reaches the right team, complete with a status and a timeline of everything that has already happened.
Response times are defined by market and team, taking into account working hours, weekends and public holidays in each country. A colour-coded system immediately shows which cases are urgent. Confirmation emails are automatically sent in the customer's language, across six languages. And management, team leads and employees each have their own dashboard showing exactly the information they need.
Every customer enquiry now has a clear owner and status. Employees no longer have to keep track of who is doing what themselves or ask colleagues about ongoing cases. Anyone taking over a case can immediately find all the information they need.
For the first time, management can truly manage the operation based on clear insights: how many cases are open, who is handling them, how long they have been open and whether agreed response times are being met. And customers receive faster answers in their own language, regardless of who handles their enquiry.
