Herbalife: product-first, service-oriented, to create a high-quality and healthy life

As a globally renowned wellness company, community and platform, Herbalife has been adhering to the philosophy of "quality first" since its founding in 1980, and has earned the trust of the public by providing high-quality products backed by science. Based on this concept, since entering the Chinese market in 1998, Herbalife has always adhered to the product as the core and service as the purpose, helping Chinese consumers embrace a healthy lifestyle of "nutrition + sports". At the same time, Herbalife has also actively carried out a lot of fruitful work in the practice of corporate social responsibility, creating a high-quality and sustainable enterprise development path, and supporting the implementation of national strategies such as "Healthy China" and "Rural Revitalization".

01

High standards and strong scientific research

Creating high-quality nutritional products

As a company with more than 40 years of experience in the field of nutrition and health, Herbalife understands that product quality is the cornerstone and lifeblood of enterprise development, and has always adhered to strict control of product quality to provide consumers with high-quality health products.

As early as 2010, Herbalife launched the "Seed to Table" quality management system, which includes 14 steps, from seed to table, every link of the entire industry chain is strictly controlled for product quality and safety, and from multiple dimensions to ensure that all Herbalife products have a source to follow, truly "safe and healthy".

In terms of raw material selection, Herbalife carefully selects high-quality, natural raw materials around the world and conducts rigorous testing to lay the foundation for high-quality products from the source. In terms of production, Herbalife is committed to building a "clean factory". The air entering the clean area must be purified through three levels of primary, medium and high efficiency, and the production environment must be kept in line with the 100,000 cleanliness standard, which has achieved the production level of pharmaceutical enterprises. In terms of full traceability, Herbalife adopts the system to manage the inbound and outbound operations of batch numbers, and the warehousing and outbound operations are managed by the WMS system, and has a complete product recall procedure to ensure the traceability of the products sold. In November 2023, the tablet workshop layout and facility upgrading project of the Suzhou factory with a total investment of more than 11 million yuan was officially put into operation to meet the needs of more reliable and flexible production, further improve the overall GMP standard of the workshop, and escort the health of consumers.

Behind high-quality products is inseparable from the support of scientific research forces. Herbalife invests in product research and development, with a scientific leadership team of more than 300 scientists around the world to guide product development. The company also has 19 laboratories for quality assurance, control, as well as R&D and testing. In order to effectively meet the nutritional and health needs of Chinese consumers, Herbalife invested RMB 160 million in 2020 to establish the world's first product innovation center in Zhangjiang, Shanghai, which has set up several domestic first-class professional laboratories, further consolidating Herbalife's local innovation and scientific research capabilities.

02

Empower marketers

Build a professional team of high-quality services

Products and services are the two main points of effort to ensure the customer experience, and for a direct selling company like Herbalife, the comprehensive quality of the marketer is particularly important, which is indispensable to providing high-quality service to customers. Herbalife attaches great importance to this and provides comprehensive training for marketers in the fields of product use, nutrition and health knowledge, business management and digital marketing, supporting them to comprehensively improve their abilities and provide personalized nutrition guidance and health solutions for each customer.

In recent years, Herbalife has launched the "Healthy China Tour" public science education activity to improve the professional knowledge and ability of marketing personnel, and invited top nutrition or sports health experts at home and abroad to give lectures on site to help marketers keep abreast of the academic research trends of nutritional food, covering weight management and scientific meal replacement, obesity epidemic status and trends and characteristics, balanced nutrition, immune health, nutrition guidance for weight loss and chronic diseases. So far, 38 events have been held in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Wuhan, Hefei, Qingdao and other places, with 61,125 participants, and have been warmly welcomed by the participants.

In addition, Herbalife has also partnered with the China Nutrition and Health Food Association to carry out public dietitian qualification training and certification for marketing personnel. Trainees who participate in the training and pass the examination can obtain a nationally recognized public dietitian qualification certificate. Up to now, nearly 10,000 people have passed the examination and obtained the fourth-level certificate of public nutritionist, and the pass rate of those participating in the examination is as high as 98%.

In 2023, Herbalife partnered with Peking University to set up a leadership development workshop for marketing management teams, inviting marketers to re-enter the campus for continuous learning. At the same time, Herbalife also actively follows the trend of digitalization, relying on the company's digital transformation, through the establishment of a "digital business school", to create practical and exclusive training courses such as "digital tool usage guide" and "social media tool usage skills", to help improve the digital communication level of marketing personnel and empower them to serve customers more efficiently.

03

Comprehensively protect the rights and interests of consumers

Escort high quality of life

Herbalife has always regarded legal compliance operation as the cornerstone of enterprise development, and has created a "three-faceted" compliance culture system to support marketers to provide high-quality services to customers and create a reassuring consumption environment for consumers. For marketing personnel, Herbalife always adheres to the business philosophy of "integrity and self-discipline", strictly abides by various laws and regulations, and integrates compliance management into every aspect of operation; For the company's internal employees, Herbalife has built a standardized and rigorous ethics and compliance management system; For consumers, Herbalife China has established a comprehensive consumer protection system and integrity service system, and strictly controls product sales channels to ensure that consumers obtain qualified and authentic products, while fully protecting and safeguarding consumers' privacy, security and legitimate rights and interests.

In the sales process, Herbalife strictly regulates the sales order to ensure that consumers get high-quality products. In the process of operation, Herbalife always sells at a uniform retail price, and resolutely resists low-price and high-price sales. The company guides consumers to buy Herbalife products through official stores and other formal channels such as WeChat official account articles, helps consumers identify "high-priced recycled genuine products - low-price real and fake mixed sales" and other means, and explains in detail to consumers how to correctly and effectively distinguish the authenticity of products and safeguard the rights and interests of consumers by issuing "Herbalife Genuine and Fake Identification Guide" and other forms.

Herbalife China's compliance department has also continued to carry out a series of special crackdown actions to create a fair and orderly market environment, so that violations have nowhere to hide. Herbalife actively cooperated with relevant regulatory authorities and continued to carry out a series of special crackdown actions such as "Lightning Action", "Net Clearing Operation" and "Thunder Operation" to crack down on unscrupulous online businesses. In 2023, more than 100 stores selling Herbalife products will be removed or closed on the entire network platform.

In terms of customer service, Herbalife China has built a multi-channel, all-round 24×7 customer service platform to receive all kinds of customer inquiries and complaints in a timely manner. At present, the company has adopted AI intelligent services to make consultation more convenient and accurate. Including the customer service hotline, Herbalife also provides a human service that covers weekdays and weekends. For all kinds of difficult escalation cases, the company promises to provide 2 working days of service response time, and internally cooperate with various functional departments to set up work order processing contacts, open a green channel for special cases, and ensure the efficient resolution of special cases.

In order to effectively protect the legitimate rights and interests of consumers, Herbalife provides consumers with a consumer protection service known as the "Golden Rule": 30-day return and exchange protection for customers. In accordance with the Herbalife Customer Protection Terms, if the product is unopened and unused within 30 days from the date of purchase, the customer can apply for a return or exchange with the proof of purchase.

04

Support the implementation of the "rural revitalization" strategy

Contribute to high-quality development

Herbalife actively responds to national policies, focuses on the pain points of rural residents in nutrition and health, and combines its own professional expertise to contribute to the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy and help promote high-quality development.

In 2019, Herbalife launched the "Rural Doctors" public welfare project, which aims to support the service capacity building of grassroots medical institutions and help the revitalization of rural public health by developing authoritative online vocational training courses for rural doctors, assisting the construction of fraternity health stations in underdeveloped rural areas, and donating "mobile hospital" equipment kits.

In 2021, Herbalife China partnered with the China Rural Development Foundation to support the World Food Programme (WFP) in Linxia County, Gansu Province, to launch a pilot project called "Meals for Preschool Children" to help improve the nutritional status and health of rural preschool children by providing nutritious meals, improving kindergarten kitchen facilities, and promoting nutrition and health education. At the same time, the project also procures food ingredients from local low-income farmers to support them to obtain stable incomes and effectively promote farmers' income. The three-year pilot project was successfully completed in July 2024. In September 2024, the project launched a new phase of donation, providing nutritious meals to more than 1,000 rural children in Jinggu County, Yunnan Province, for a school year. In addition, the project will provide nutrition education packages to 10 rural primary schools.

Looking ahead, Herbalife will deepen local innovation across the board, provide more science-based high-quality nutritional products for Chinese consumers, and empower marketers to provide consumers with a high-quality "product + service" experience. Herbalife will actively cooperate with all stakeholders to create and share a green, high-quality and sustainable future, and become a grassroots promoter of the grand strategy of "Healthy China". (Advertisement)

Produced by the New Media Editorial Department of China Consumer Daily

Editor/Li Xiaoyu

Producer/He Yongpeng, Ren Zhenyu

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