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
Casio reviews its business models and business cycles from a user-first perspective across the entire group. 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.
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 continuously 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.
In addition, the Center is working to improve the customer experience in 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 Customer Support Center respects customers and is working to 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. Also, in accordance with the diversification of communication styles, we are working to expand products covered for chat support, which is in high demand with customers, and to expand the subjects customers can consult about.
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 [AM1] of Customer Inquiries in Japan (Fiscal 2022, Consumer Products)
| Fiscal 2021 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Item | Japan | Overseas |
| Timepieces | 42.0% | 78.8% |
| Calculators | 3.4% | 13.1% |
| Electrical Musical Instruments | 6.6% | 3.6% |
| Other Consumer Products | 22.3% | 3.6% |
| System Equipment | 25.7% | 0.9% |
| Total | 100.0% | 100.0% |
Breakdown of Product Inquiries (Fiscal 2021, Overseas/Japan)
│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 in product functions and provide service quality that satisfies customers.
By training employees so that they are expert not only in repair skills but in their customer response and product knowledge, 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 constantly 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 FamilyMart 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, such as the one in the G-SHOCK STORE SHIBUYA, which opened in Jingumae, Shibuya-ku (MIYASHITA PARK) in July 2020. 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 GINZA
G-SHOCK STORE SHIBUYA
G-SHOCK STORE GINZA
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 957 companies, including 12 local subsidiaries and 945 repair partners, carry out after-sales service for Casio brand products (as of March 2022).
Casio holds regular technical skill courses for service 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, quality and costs at its each site. In 2021, Casio was forced to limit after-sales service activities at its sites due to the worldwide spread of COVID-19 but worked to maintain and improve skill levels at sites 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
Amid the continuing complications of travel between countries due to the spread of COVID-19, we strived to accurately grasp the conditions at our repair sites around the world and to improve them by carrying out remote environment inspections.
We also periodically held remote quality control circles involving repair sites outside Japan. Through these, we shared the results of environment inspections, exchanged opinions about making further improvements, shared repair-related issues experienced in each country, and engaged in discussions on these topics. Compared with the previous modes of communication such as telephone calls and in-person overseas travel, these remote audits and discussions enabled us to communicate with a greater number of personnel involved simultaneously, free of concerns about travel time and costs, thereby deepening levels of mutual understanding with the sites.
We will carry out remote audits of sites outside Japan and remote quality control circle activities on a continual basis in the future, and we will connect these efforts to further enhancement of worldwide repair quality.