Activities to Improve Customer Satisfaction
Management
Social Issue
In recent years, customers have been using a variety of information channels including social media, shifting from the approach of merely buying what they want toward a practice of greater awareness of how they will use a product in their daily lives. In accordance with this, Casio believes it is important to provide products and services that will increase customer satisfaction.
Importance for the Casio Group
Due to these changes in the awareness of customers, it has become more difficult to differentiate Casio’s products from the products of other companies on the basis of product functionality alone. Casio believes it is important to increase confidence in the company’s brand and improve customer satisfaction by analyzing customer perspectives collected from social media and a variety of other information channels, as well as data on products brought in for repairs, and incorporating this analysis into product development leveraging cooperation among the relevant departments.
Policy
We leverage creativity to raise customer expectations and generate excitement while enriching peoples’ minds, hearts and lives worldwide. Through three major customer satisfaction (CS) activities, Casio is working to improve after-sales service and product quality. It is using consumer feedback to improve products and services, in order to maintain customer trust and provide peace of mind.
After-sales CS
Casio is making various efforts to ensure that customers are satisfied with its after-sales service. These efforts include enhancing staff training programs to improve product knowledge, repair technical skills, and customer service skills. Casio is also working to boost customer service quality by having staff acquire public qualifications and by improving customer service sites.
Functional CS
Casio is also striving to ensure that customer feedback around the world is always delivered directly to the right place within the company, and to take unified improvement measures. Casio is also constantly working to improve product functions.
Quality CS
Casio compiles and analyzes information on customer inquiries and product defects around the world. It focuses on early detection, rapid response and prevention of recurrence of problems.
From product planning and development to after-sales service, Casio works closely with customers who use our products to envisage the ideals for those products, and implements group-wide improvement activities such as proposing improvements to product development and providing services that enhance customer satisfaction. With three main customer satisfaction activities as the basic policy, Casio consolidates customer perspectives from a user-first point of view and strives to leverage cooperation across organizations, including at the senior management level, in the sharing of the information and its use in improving after-sales service.
In July 2023, the CS Headquarters also released internal guidelines for all employees to increase their understanding of customer satisfaction. Casio encourages each and every employee to recognize and take action on the opportunities they have to take the initiative on customer satisfaction in the course of their duties.
Activity Results
Customer Service Initiatives in Japan
In order to respond to customer inquiries regarding Casio products, a customer contact department was created in 1981. Today, members of the Customer Support Center are working to acquire product knowledge and improve customer service quality, in an effort to ensure that all customers will become lifelong Casio fans. In addition, by steadily providing customer feedback to relevant departments within the company, the center is actively working to ensure that the voice of the customer is reflected in product creation and service development.
The Customer Support Center also works to reliably collect customer feedback, and improve the customer experience in ways suited to each particular region by facilitating smooth cooperation with the customer support centers set up at local sales companies around the world.
Emphasizing the sensibility of “consideration”
The Center is constantly working to expand its channels of communication with customers, as communication styles diversify with changing social trends. The Center works hard to provide the support that customers expect via each channel.
In these efforts, the Customer Support Center strives to respect customers and serve them based on the wish to be helpful. At the same time, the staff do not simply answer callers’ questions; they strive to accurately grasp the core reasons for each inquiry, and to propose appropriate solutions, while emphasizing good interpersonal communication. Casio also continuously strives to improve the value of the customer experience by conducting periodic satisfaction surveys concerning customer service response and making relevant improvements.
At the same time, Casio takes a resolute stance against the emerging social issue of harassment by customers, and has formulated a company-wide response policy with respect to it.
Sharing customer feedback and making improvements from the customer’s perspective
The center shares opinions and inquiries received from customers with relevant departments such as the development and sales departments. This customer feedback is then used to make even better products and services.
At the same time, Casio is actively working on improvement from customer's perspective, based on analysis of customer feedback.
Specifically, Casio is striving to provide mechanisms that allow users to resolve problems themselves, by providing content designed from the customer’s perspective on its customer support websites, which serve as important touchpoints for customer interaction. Similarly, we are working in cooperation with local customer support centers to augment FAQ sections on customer support websites around the world.
Breakdown of Customer Inquiries in Japan (Fiscal 2023, Consumer Products)
| Fiscal 2023 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Item | Japan | Overseas |
Timepieces |
41.1% |
78.7% |
Education (calculators, electronic dictionaries) |
9.6% |
16.5% |
Electrical Musical Instruments |
7.2% |
3.5% |
Other Consumer Products |
13.1% |
0.6% |
System Equipment |
29.0% |
0.7% |
Total |
100.0% |
100.0% |
Breakdown of Product Inquiries
Customer Satisfaction Initiatives in Japan
The service departments at Casio, which are responsible for customer satisfaction in after-sales service, continue to work to improve repair skills, product knowledge and skills for communicating with customers in order to provide after-sales service that satisfies customers. In addition, Casio is building a questionnaire system using its text messages in an effort to earn even greater customer trust and respond immediately to ever-changing needs. By listening to the evaluations and opinions of customers, Casio is working hard to develop a service system that prioritizes customer needs and lifestyles and improves convenience.
Reliable service quality
Casio Techno, which repairs Casio products, strives to help its employees earn public certifications and professional qualifications such as first-class and second-class watch repair technician certification — a Japanese national certification — so that they can quickly adapt to continuously advancing product functions and provide service quality that satisfies customers.
By training employees so that they are expert not only in repair skills but also possess extensive product knowledge and are good at responding to customers, Casio Techno aims to provide customers with even higher quality, detail-oriented services. Casio believes that it can promise to provide customers with services that deliver peace of mind and happiness precisely because each individual employee is working to acquire advanced technical skills and become a person who can please and earn the trust of customers.
Pursuing convenience for customers
The Akihabara, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka and Fukuoka Service Stations offer a quick battery replacement service (completed in about 60 minutes). They also provide one-day repair services for electronic dictionaries that are in particularly high use by students.
Casio’s online repair request service allows customers to pick up their repaired products at convenience stores in Japan, among other services. This new system is part of Casio’s ongoing efforts to improve convenience tailored to meet customer needs and lifestyles.
Raising brand value
G-SHOCK stores, which are directly operated by Casio, also feature a maintenance booth dedicated to providing after-sales services. There are eight of these maintenance booths, such as the one in the G-SHOCK STORE NAGOYA, which opened at Maruei Galleria in Nagoya-shi, Aichi in August 2022. By having Casio employees provide consistent services from sales to after-sales service, Casio is striving to raise its brand value by energizing communication with users.
G-SHOCK STORE SHIBUYA
G-SHOCK STORE NAGOYA
Casio will continue to adjust and enhance its services to match customer needs for each product to ensure that customers remain loyal fans of Casio products.
Customer Satisfaction Initiatives outside Japan
Outside Japan, a total of 929 companies, including 10 local subsidiaries and 919 partners, carry out after-sales service for Casio products (as of March 2023).
Casio holds regular technical skill courses for repair technicians in order to raise repair skill levels, aiming to ensure that customers around the world receive high-quality repair services. In addition, Casio constantly surveys and improves repair times, repair quality and costs at each site. In 2022, Casio was forced to limit after-sales service activities worldwide due to the impact of COVID-19 but worked to maintain and improve skill levels at sites actively using online training.
Casio will continue to work with its service sites to further improve the after-sales service for Casio products.
Repair centers operated by group companies outside Japan
In China, Casio trialed an online skills contest that saw participants compete on repair skills and customer service, with the goal of boosting the morale of partner companies and enhancing its systems for cooperation with them. In the Middle East, the local companies worked together with the sales division to improve customer satisfaction by expanding the service awareness activities which were so well received in Dubai to other countries around the UAE.
Casio Headquarters periodically held remote quality control circles involving repair sites outside Japan. Through inspections at repair sites, it strived to solve issues experienced in each country. Casio will carry out remote quality control circle activities at sites outside Japan on a continual basis in the future, and it will connect these efforts to further enhancement of worldwide repair quality.