7 minutes
How Herman Miller Makes Their Customer-Centric Privacy Program a Competitive Differentiator with OneTrust PreferenceChoice
Herman Miller is a globally recognized and publicly traded provider of furnishings and related technologies and services. Since its inception in 1905, the global design leader has evolved into Herman Miller Group, a family of brands including Design Within Reach, Geiger, and Maharam that collectively offer a variety of products for environments where people live, learn, work, and heal.
OneTrust has been extremely beneficial in automating our user consent process. There is so much flexibility it’s mindboggling. It just shows that the system was set up thoughtfully.
The award-winning company leverages Salesforce’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, Marketing Cloud for B2C and internal-facing campaigns, Pardot as their B2B marketing automation tool, and Adobe Experience Manager for content management. The company faces unique challenges around managing data privacy, specifically related to Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL), Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ePrivacy Regulation as well as California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)—and about 100 other standards, frameworks, and laws—because it utilizes a dynamic marketing stack for global initiatives.
According to Dustin VerBeek, Herman Miller’s Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, the team’s goal is to get more people into the sales funnel; however, Herman Miller also recognizes the importance of managing customer data privacy and consent.
“Oftentimes, privacy laws seem counter-intuitive to what marketers are trying to accomplish, says VerBeek. “Yet, if we look at our marketing initiatives as a way to build trust, then we win as a company. By providing transparency and choice around consent and preferences, Herman Miller not only stands out from the crowd as a marketing engine, but as a global enterprise in today’s shifting regulatory landscape.”
To make this statement a reality, Herman Miller selected OneTrust PreferenceChoice to manage consent and preferences across all brands globally. The team integrated PreferenceChoice technology with its existing marketing stack—Salesforce, Pardot, and Adobe Experience Manager—to create user-centric privacy experiences that are on-brand, compliant, and trustworthy.
How OneTrust PreferenceChoiceTM Supports Data Privacy and Consent Management
Herman Miller leverages PreferenceChoice Consent and Preference Management and Consumer & Data Subject Rights Request solutions.
Data-driven marketing facilitates more personalized content, but capturing the consent required to reach an audience and drive engagement is increasingly complex in a privacy-focused world. To simplify this task, Herman Miller implemented OneTrust PreferenceChoice Universal Consent and Preference Management across all 300+ of their webforms. This powers the company to collect consent with detailed records of who, when, and what a person was told as well as how they consented. For the user, this creates better experiences by demonstrating respect for customer choices while integrating marketing applications for consistency across marketing and sales activities.
Oftentimes privacy laws seem counter-intuitive to what marketers are trying to accomplish. Yet, if we look at it our marketing initiatives as a way to build trust, then we win as a company. By providing transparency and choice around consent and preferences, Herman Miller not only stands out from the crowd as a marketing engine, but as a global enterprise in today’s shifting regulatory landscape.
By giving users control, Herman Miller is driving better opt-in rates and granular opt-down setting options versus a global unsubscribe. This means they can select their exact preferences, including which emails they want to subscribe to (design, healthcare, education, investors, careers, etc.). Herman Miller gives this level of choice and control to all users, regardless of if their regional laws require consent. This enhances their culture of trust and positions them well as privacy regulations become more stringent globally.
“The PreferenceChoice implementation drove our marketing team to go back and document the different ways and mechanisms in which we collect customer data,” added VerBeek. “This helped us determine what initiatives we should and should not continue, and brought to light how we can connect with our customers in a more transparent and compliant manner.”
Responding to consumer rights is a time-consuming process full of manual tasks. This makes it a challenge to respond to regulatory requirements, to detect exactly where consumer data exists, and to access, port, delete data, or comply with opt-outs. With OneTrust Consumer Rights, Herman Miller built a secure and comprehensive consumer portal to intake data requests in a way that matches their brand. In practice, the company’s privacy team receives a notification when a consumer rights request is made, and the request is automatically routed to Herman Miller’s marketing team for appropriate action. The portal validates the user’s identity to ensure the appropriate information is being provided within various regulatory time requirements.
Combined, these two products ensure data accuracy and compliance across Herman Miller’s marketing technology stack. The products not only capture consent and preference details but also give marketers tools to manage subject rights requests across all webpages while creating a historical database to demonstrate compliance.
How the PreferenceChoice and Pardot Integration Works
Given the importance of lead generation in the industry, Herman Miller needed to have minimal to no downtime in integrating PreferenceChoice and Pardot. Fortunately, setting up API calls between the two platforms was seamless with myOneTrust documentation.
All webforms on Herman Miller websites are integrated with OneTrust and leverage Adobe AEM as their content management platform. OneTrust Universal Consent records all consent dates and times and documents which form the consent came from. The consent is captured in OneTrust, then passed to Herman Miller’s Pardot system via an API call. If a user updates their consent choice, a new API call is sent and received, essentially a “digital handshake” between the two systems, explained VerBeek.
The ability to integrate OneTrust, Pardot, and Adobe was critical to Herman Miller as it provides the company with an audit trail of consent in the event of a regulatory inquiry.
The PreferenceChoice implementation drove our marketing team to go back and document the different ways and mechanisms in which we collect customer data. This helped us determine what initiatives we should and should not continue, and brought to light how we can connect with our customers in a more transparent and compliant manner.
Unique Value for Consent Management and Data Privacy
OneTrust PreferenceChoice streamlines an otherwise complex and manual process and gives customers transparency, choice, and control that uniquely differentiates them from their competitors. By implementing a comprehensive platform, Herman Miller is future-proofing data privacy and consent operations while also driving more data-driven decisions.
OneTrust has been extremely beneficial in automating our user consent process. There is so much flexibility it’s mindboggling. It just shows that the system was set up thoughtfully.
