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that this kind of test was probably excessive since few customers were likely to open their sunroof under such extreme weather conditions. The test was dropped, making extra savings for Toyota and resulting in no customer complaints so far.
Despite the simplicity of the message, often companies that fail to listen to their customers end up unnecessarily complicating things for them. Manufacturers have for some time recognized that “value” means different things to consumers and to engineers. Customer satisfaction strategy has to emphasize customer interfaces. Turning
a corporation into a truly customer-driven organization can sometimes require dramatic efforts to improve communications between the market and the back of ce. Take Panasonic for example. To increase its sensitivity
to the market, the company regularly mobilizes its whole organization to visit millions of households in order to decipher customer needs and collect new insights.
Applying the Golden Rules
In the past, competition for many Japanese companies was centered on eliminating errors to reach zero defects in product quality. Today, the emphasis is on eliminating errors to achieve zero defects in customer service. This is likely to be increasingly achieved through greater attention to detail. Since competitive advantage is more and more dif cult to sustain because of closer monitoring of competitors’ strategic intent
and management practices, speed of information, and benchmarking practices, focus on detail is likely to make the difference between the best companies and the rest. It is particularly critical in the service industry since the customer consumes the service as it is created. Unlike manufacturing industries, service industries have no room for a recall, for correcting an error. In most cases, unhappy customers will not even complain. To avoid
an argument, they will simply go away, and not return! Attention to detail is an area in which many Japanese companies excel. As was the case with the total quality movement, employee education, selection, training, and motivation are the key success factors to make staff aware of the importance of detail.
Conclusions
Many global players like Amazon, Apple, Hilton Hotels and Resorts, and Nestlé are already service quality leaders in their respective industries. On the one hand, a number of Western corporations such as General Electric, Renault, and Xerox have used their operations in Japan to benchmark themselves against the best organizations in their worldwide networks. For example, Renault has been able to learn from its partner Nissan, and the Xerox group certainly owes a great deal to Fuji-Xerox for its comeback in the ght against Canon. On the other hand, Japanese companies in the service
6 Conversation with Tadashi Yanai and the GNAM, Tokyo, April 24, 2015.
industry have met with challenges when exporting
their best practices overseas. With the exception of a number of major consumer and industrial brands such as Toyota, Canon, and Panasonic, not many Japanese service companies have made it globally (in retail, hotel, insurance, advertising, and banking, for example). This can be explained by the dif culties that are involved
in implementing best practices in a different cultural context. As Tadashi Yanai, the founder of UNIQLO – one of the few service companies that has found global success – likes to repeat: “In some parts of the world, the customer is king, in Japan, the customer is God!”6
However, what seems to distinguish the best Japanese companies from some of their foreign competitors is
a continuous thirst to learn, as well as a great deal of humility. In their search to give customers more value for money, leading Japanese companies use simple and practical tools employed by other excellent companies around the world – careful selection of employees, extensive training, and far-reaching communications programs. A major difference between Japanese and Western corporations may be a stronger emphasis
on personal commitment from both employees and managers to customer satisfaction campaigns, as
well as on greater focus on detail. As more and more companies apply the same marketing techniques, they are forced to look for new ways to differentiate themselves and thus attention to detail becomes an important source of competitive advantage. Kao, for example, replies to a client’s request on the spot, and Mazda takes care of customers’ insurance renewals. One Western expatriate in Tokyo dismissed these initiatives as “marginal managerial improvements,” but in today’s highly competitive environment, in which customers are becoming increasingly demanding
and selective, such “details” may well make a critical difference in gaining and retaining customers.
References
1. Drucker, F. P. (1974). Management. New York: Harper Collins. 2. Levitt, T. (1986). The marketing imagination. New York: Free
Press.
3. Reichheld, F. F., & Markey, R. (2011).The ultimate question 2.0: How net promoter companies thrive in a customer-driven world. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Press.
4. Turner, P., & Kalman, D. (2014). Make your people before you make your products: Using talent management to achieve competitive advantage in global organizations. Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom: Wiley.
Author’s note: This article is an update of “Japanese Approaches to Customer Satisfaction” that appeared in Long Range Planning, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 84 to 90, 1995.
Author: Professor Dominique Turpin was named IMD President in July 2010. He is also Nestlé Professor at IMD. He has worked as
a consultant and management educator with a large number of international companies including: Coca Cola, CPW, Danone, DSM, Jardine Matheson, Nestlé, Novo Nordisk, Philips and Uponor. He received his master’s degree from ESSCA in France. He earned a doctorate in economics from Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan.
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