Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service

Service

Turning high-quality Japanese customer experience into a global standard

Japanese consumers are widely held to hold some of the most exacting standards for the customer experience and customer service standards that they receive from companies. While globally promptness in responding to questions and transactions (i.e., efficiency) is most highly valued, in Japan, the greatest emphasis is instead placed on earnest customer service (detail orientedness). For this reason, blindly applying in Japan the advanced methods for driving efficiency that are being deployed globally will not necessarily lead to success.

Generating customer value through a deep understanding of your customers and continuously improving the customer experience through a real-time understanding of customers is something that it is important for companies to tackle for themselves. Companies should create customer experiences that are unique to them by leveraging advanced technology to boost productivity and establish the foundations for understanding of their customers and the provision of customer experiences, and by applying labor to address operations at customer contact points that require detailed handling. Companies can also enable sustainable growth by building a stand-out competitive advantage through the systematized and global deployment of high-quality customer experience developed in the Japanese market.

As a consulting firm originating out of Japan and Asia, ABeam Consulting provides end-to-end support to clients for everything from formulating a customer strategy to realizing transformation, including introducing organizational transformation and technology, and global expansion, based on our extensive track record in customer experience transformation in the Japanese market, one of the most demanding in world in this area.

Trends/Challenges

Enhancing customer understanding

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.

Improving speed of transformation with systematized, industry-specific approaches

Due to the rapid development of technology, customer purchasing behavior has changed dramatically, while the business environment is transforming itself at a dizzying pace. Customers determine their purchasing behavior based on overall value, which is made up not only of the physical and rational value that comes from the features and capabilities of a product or service, but also the psychological and emotional value gained throughout the customer service experience from the various contact points with the company. To address such changes, all companies need to work to improve the value of their customer experience, regardless of whether they are BtoB or BtoC firms.

With that said, the schemes through which companies provide their customer experience will vary by industry and specific company. It is not possible to achieve transformations that improve the value of their customer experience through a one-size-fits-all methodology. To drive transformation that addresses the speed of change in the business environment, companies need to make use of scientific methodologies that have been systematized per industry to improve their chances of realization and the speed at which this can be achieved, and to provide the value of their customer experience specific to them, based on proper customer understanding.

Improving executive capacities and productivity using technology

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.

Generating value and realizing a customer experience based on customer understanding

Transformation aimed at improving the value of customer experience does not end with just a single change. Companies need to constantly monitor customer changes across all of their customer contact points and continue to adjust intelligently to those changes.

It is also not enough for companies to just enact changes associated with customer contact points if they are to improve the value of their customer experience. Rather, this represents an agenda item that needs to be addressed company wide with the goal of providing an end-to-end customer experience, going beyond operational and organizational boundaries to include revisions to the overall value chain aimed at harmonizing demand chains and supply chains, as well as the introduction of MOps (Marketing Operations) and RevOps (Revenue Operations) with a view to strengthening the links between organizations.

Companies also need to build ecosystems for providing end-to-end customer experiences by coordinating with other companies in cases where the provision of value to customers is inadequate due to issues such as interruptions arising between experiences, where individual companies have built their customer experiences in isolation. It is important for companies to work to improve the value of their customer experience on a company wide and even cross-company level, based on a continuous understanding of their customers, in order to provide customer experiences that meet customer expectations and address customer changes.

Global expansion/realizing business scaling

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.

Insights

Where ABeam Stands Out

  • Supporting sustained growth based on industry insights

    ABeam Consulting supports companies and organizations in achieving sustained growth across a wide range of industries. We use industry-specific customer insights based on years of industry knowledge, and provide reliable services backed by extensive experience.

  • Transforming the entire value chain, beginning with an understanding of the customer

    ABeam Consulting supports transformation across the entire value chain, going beyond marketing, sales and customer service to extend into supply chain, finance, and HR. Our process starts with a firm understanding of the customer by analyzing customer behavior data.

  • Specialist insights and organic collaboration with experts to create business outcomes

    ABeam Consulting works with clients to provide end-to-end support across strategy formulation, organizational and operational transformation, and implementation and execution of technology to create business outcomes through transformation. Our approach uses specialist insights based on a strong track record in marketing, sales and customer service, and organic collaboration with experts.

Services Provided

ABeam Consulting offers side-by-side support for generating new value and new customer experiences, and expanding these on a global scale, based on industry-specific trends and agendas, that begin with a data science-enabled real-time, high-degree of understanding of customers and their evolving needs.

Contact

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