Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service

While many companies understand the importance of improving the value of their customer experience, simply engaging in surface-level initiatives such as optimizing customer contact points for products and services, or switching to a better user interface, will not be enough to stand out from the crowd of competitors.
With an overabundance of goods and information, customers now have many choices available to them. In an era of heightened awareness around social themes, chief among them being SDGs, companies need to work to provide the value sought after by customers based on a thorough understanding of them, if they want to become customers’ company of choice. With the market environment and the values in demand from customers constantly in flux, companies also need to keep up to date with their customer understanding in real time.

Meanwhile, even though companies have all sorts of data about their customers, they often fail to make effective use of that data. Among the issues we frequently encounter are cases where the data needed for customer understanding has not been sufficiently defined, cases where siloing within organizations prevents effective application of data to understand their customers, and cases where companies fail to make progress in customer understanding despite having integrated their data, due to a lack of proper analysis. To build up a competitive edge, it is essential for companies to look at the value they offer in a fresh light and to generate the value propositions that customers really demand. To that end, it is important for companies to seek to improve customer understanding such that they can overcome challenges associated with customer data and combine both depth and real-time analysis.

For companies to combine improvements to productivity and customer experience amidst a declining working population, they need to work to streamline operations using technology, automating repetitive work and accelerating decision making using data and AI, while also making concentrated investments of human capital as needed into customer contact operations that require detailed, manual handling.

With that said, selecting and introducing of technology by just blindly incorporating advanced technology based on global success cases will not necessarily lead to successful outcomes. Introducing the wrong technology for your company risks harming one or both of productivity and customer experience. For this reason, selecting the right technology takes discernment.

Additionally, companies seeking to revise their entire value chain to improve the value of their customer experience or to improve interlinking between companies and organizations need to not only make use of technology in relation to their customer contact points, but they also need to rebuild their grand designs for their system platforms overall, including their core systems. While making use of technology is essential to securing competitive advantage, it is also important for companies to work to improve their executive capacities and productivity, while seeking to optimize their system platforms overall based on discerning selection of technology and the setting of clear goals.

Due to changing demographic trends in Japan, scaling through global expansion has become a critical factor for business growth and success. Global expansion means more than just selling products and services on the global stage. Companies should aim to differentiate themselves from global companies by offering the high-quality customer experiences developed in the Japanese market, a developed country market first to experience new challenges, in a form that will be accepted in those new countries. To that end, it is important for companies to systematize the operations and technologies they use to offer their particular customer experiences, and establish schemes for providing those experiences in a way that can be easily localized across countries.

Companies can also offer streamlined and reliable customer experiences by planning and executing production, sales and inventory that is optimized as a whole on a global level, rather than individually across regions or business domains, by establishing global governance rules for expanding domestically and internationally while ensuring suitable operations, and by making sure those rules permeate their organizations.