CX (Marketing, Sales and Services)

To achieve sustainable growth, it is essential for companies to continuously enhance their value through customer insight and relationships of trust, and strengthen customer relationships. They must also maximize revenue efficiency when providing customer value and continuously improve efficiency in the use of management resources.

Simply revising products and services or improving customer touchpoints such as UI or UX is not enough to improve customer value. To build competitive advantage in customer value, companies must clarify the underlying reasons for customer behavior before redefining their value proposition and revising their entire customer experience based on that insight.

To maximize revenue efficiency, companies must enhance cost efficiency through integrated management of customer-facing departments, data-driven decision-making, and the automation of operational processes, achieved by optimizing organization-wide activities and leveraging advanced technologies such as AI. Companies established in Japan should also diversify their revenue streams by systematizing superior customer experience practices honed in the Japanese market and extending them to global markets.

To establish sustainable growth, organizations should create roadmaps that strategically enhance customer value and optimize revenue efficiency, rather than making partial improvements to customer experiences or repeatedly attempting to streamline operations in isolated customer touchpoints or departments.

In addition to the functional and practical value provided by the features and capabilities of a product or service, customers make purchasing decisions by holistically assessing the emotional and psychological value they gain through various touchpoints with a company. To improve customer value, it is important for companies to not only provide a unique customer experience based on customer insight, but also to provide a consistent, seamless, and effortless customer experience across all touchpoints.

It is important to redefine all customer touchpoints across the company and its business partners (including distributors) and to orchestrate integrated physical and digital channels, including advertising media, physical stores, e-commerce sites, digital portals, apps, contact centers, and social media. The source of business value lies in the ability to go beyond optimizing any single channel to create a customer experience that enables customers to navigate smoothly and without friction at any touchpoint. To create such a seamless customer experience, it is essential to integrate data that is fragmented across different companies, departments, and systems to design a truly customer-centric experience. By combining customer data from marketing, sales, customer support, and business partners, leveraging these assets across the organization, and building an ecosystem that connects the customer experience will allow companies to create a truly customer-first experience.

To continuously improve the customer experience, companies must quantitatively measure the experience and establish mechanisms for continuous improvement. The customer experience is not a one-time effort. It is a “business resource” that must flexibly evolve to respond to customer expectations and changes in the market environment. To take on this challenge across the entire organization, companies must design performance indicators and build a PDCA cycle to pursue improvements to their intellectual and relational capital and enhance the value of their non-financial capital.
Viewing the customer experience not as a vague feeling but as a measurable and actionable initiative—and continuously improving it across the organization—is the key to future competitiveness.

As Japan’s working-age population continues to decline, companies must simultaneously boost productivity and enhance the customer experience. Achieving this requires leveraging technology to streamline operations and generate new value—by automating routine tasks, accelerating decision-making through data and AI, and delivering personalized experiences tailored to each customer. At the same time, it is unrealistic to manage every customer interaction solely through technology. High-value engagements call for a focused investment in human capital.

In recent years, many organizations have adopted advanced tools—such as CDP, MA, SFA, and BI—to capture customer behavior in real time, enabling them to engage through the right channels at the right moments, while creating new value and enhancing the value of existing offerings. However, blindly adopting cutting-edge technologies based on global success stories can backfire, undermining both productivity and the customer experience. To avoid this, companies must carefully select and implement technologies that match their specific business characteristics and stage of maturity. Moreover, genuinely improving the customer experience requires strengthening collaboration not only at customer touchpoints but across the entire value chain. This calls for redesigning and rebuilding system architectures holistically, including backend systems.

Effective use of technology is critical to sustaining competitiveness. Reviewing systems with a view toward overall optimization lays the foundation  for stronger execution capabilities and an enhanced customer experience.