Episode #398: Elements Of Outstanding Customer Service In Japan - Part One

Customer service in Japan is pretty good by comparison with most other countries. To me, it is polite yet impersonal. The status gap between those serving and those being served is quite rigid. In my own country of Australia, those serving are quite happy to have a conversation with the customer. They don’t see themselves as inferior in status and treat customers as equals. In Japan, there is no such equality. The language and the culture both reinforce the buyer as God, and those serving are mere mortals there to do God’s bidding.

Let’s look at some elements of excellent customer service over a three-part series. The sad aspect here is that what I am going to describe is totally obvious and will garner a “so what” reaction. I urge you to go beyond that initial first blush and use this as a measuring rod to calibrate how your organisation deals with customer service problems and check if you are operating at the right level of service or not.

1. Totally professional
This is fairly obvious, but that professionalism comes from a combination of attitude, experience and training. Even if you don’t have much experience, if your attitude is that you want to provide the highest level of service, then good things will flow from that starting point and we gain experience over time. If properly trained, then the whole process gets sped up.

2. Knowledge
Surprisingly, a lot of people in the service sector have very little knowledge of the inventory, systems, ethos and values. When you ask a clarifying question, their face fills with panic and they have to go seek the answer from someone else. This is a failure of leadership. If they were properly invested in, then they would know the answer without having to run off and find the answer.

3. Highly personalised service
Manualised or formulistic service is the norm in Japan. Companies try to reduce all complexity down to one way of doing things and for the majority of clients, that will be fine. To lift above the great unwashed competitors, we need to be able to provide a more personalised service.
I was reminded of this recently when I brought a pocket square online from Massimo Pirrone in Antwerp. The item arrived in a nice box and additionally, he included a short note and a very nice pen as well. It felt very personalised and I became an instant fan.

4. Take Ownership
Japan is very good when order and harmony prevail. Chaos, the unexpected disasters – not so much. The nature of customer service is that there is always going to be a high frequency of the unexpected occurring. The key is how we react to the changing situation.

When things go wrong, customers want the issue solved and solved instantly. They expect the person they are interacting with to make it happen, regardless of the degree of difficulty. Japan has a nasty edge to it when customers exploit their expectations too far and start bullying staff, because the customer is God.

If the person serving the customer takes ownership of the problem, they will keep pursuing the solution until resolution. That is the mentality the supervision and training need to reinforce.

5. Anticipatory
Omotenashi is the high point of Japanese service and a big element is the person serving the customer to anticipate what the customer needs before they voice that request. On a hot day, being served some iced water as you enter the business is a nice touch, completed without you have to place an order. This is an attitude of service that drives behaviour. With the right leadership, this can be taught.

6. Proactive
This is similar to anticipatory, in the sense that we are not adopting a passive stance. We try to arrange things well before the need arises by being well prepared. We are always looking for faster and better ways of doing things.

We are making suggestions for the client, for their best interests, rather than expecting them to have complete knowledge of what we can do for them. They will never know our business to the depths that we do and so we have to be thinking ahead and bringing up possibilities which wouldn’t necessarily occur to them.

We will keep going with our list of things to think about in terms of the service we currently supply and how we supply it in parts Two and Three.