customer service

Saving Britain’s SMEs

I was dismayed to find that the Japanese restaurant in the London station I regularly use to eat at before catching my train, or to buy a bento, has started closing at 6pm, and is for takeaways only. A change in fire and safety regulations had caused it to close down for a month, and only reopen in a limited way.

The previous day I ate at another Japanese restaurant, in Slough, a town an hour west of London. It had changed hands since my last visit, and is now run by Filipinos. The staff at the hotel I was staying in mostly seemed to be Filipino too. Five years ago, such hotel staff were usually East European, but now Brexit has ended freedom of movement of labour, we are seeing more and more Asian and African nationals coming to Britain to work.

I was surprised at all these changes – but the man behind the counter at the London Japanese restaurant told me this was not a recent development. This made me realise that I had not visited them as regularly as in the past. I am not travelling so often as much of my training is now online, so people working from home, or in other countries can join the sessions.

As a result, I am busier than I have been for many years, but other British small-medium size enterprises (employing up to 249 people) are facing a tough time at the moment. A recent survey showed their confidence is the lowest it has been since the start of the pandemic. They don’t have the resources, especially after the pandemic, to cope with changes in regulations, labour supply, trade with the EU or rising energy prices.

The UK’s SMEs employ 60% of the British workforce– the same percentage as in Japan. Like Japan, the UK’s SMEs have had various kinds of government support through the pandemic and now for the energy crisis. But the government’s energy bill support will halve after March.

As a consequence of this, and the train strikes, the hospitality and retail sectors are particularly gloomy. The strikes are, I hope, a short term problem, but in the longer term, SMEs are having to rethink their business.

I sense a return to face to face happening – both at work and socially. Companies want staff to meet each other, for morale and team building and people want to socialize. But this might happen outside the big cities, rather than forcing everyone to commute in.

The local authority in my region wants to implement 20 minute neighbourhoods – communities where people can walk to and from – within twenty minutes – shops, restaurants, schools and healthcare. Perhaps the Japanese restaurant in the London station will return to its roots. I first ate there when it started in Brighton, a town an hour south of London. I am sure it will be welcomed back by the increasing numbers of hybrid workers living there.

This article by Pernille Rudlin first appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News in March 2023

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Japanese values prevent digital transformation

Kimura Takeshi, a Nikkei IT journalist has a self-styled hard hitting rant in Nikkei Business about Showa values such as omoiyari and how they should be ditched if Japanese IT companies are to compete globally. I have to admit he shocked me, as I even titled my book about how to provide Japanese style customer service “Omoiyari”, but then I was brought up in Japan during the Showa era (1926-1989).

He says omoiyari (consideration for others, forethought) and being close to the customer is still important in hospitality or medicine but is plain creepy and useless when it comes to IT. He points out that all it means is that you are close to other humans in the customer company, who are running the IT department, and who will not necessarily tell you or know the full picture of what is going on in their company.

Other Showa values he gives a good kicking to include gembaryoku – or onsite capability, meaning that suppliers are there working at the customer site and “we never give up, never run away.” As he points out (and I’ve often warned suppliers to Japanese companies of this too) this leads to over-servicing and all kinds of work being done which were not in the original project spec, tipping profits into losses.

He also points out that Japanese companies that boast of these values are usually homogeneous organisations with a strong sense of companionship and self sacrifice, where employees are working for the organisation and colleagues, as well as having a budget busting customer entertainment allowance. Not only will this not be competitive globally, but it also means the company is a closed organisation without diversity. High performers are disliked by others. Deference and consensus based decision making (nemawashi) are the norm.

He says this is why foreigners coming to Japan as tourists love it so much, because there is such a strong urge to be considerate and hospitable towards others. But once they live in Japan, they are expected to be members of the community and learn how to read the air and be considerate of others around them, but find this difficult to do as they have been brought up to be self assertive and individualistic. As a result they are excluded from the community and treated as strangers, causing unhappiness and confusion.

Kimura says it feels uncomfortable to have to tell Japanese people to deny their compassionate natures, but he worries that if they don’t, then Japan will not be able to ride the wave of digital revolution and will not only be underdeveloped in IT but an underdeveloped country in a more fundamental sense. IT companies need to include foreigners so that they can thoroughly discuss and create new digital services without having to read the air or worry about whether it would mean a loss of jobs for people who have supported you on the client side.

Instead of omoiyari based closeness to a customer he recommends “がっぷり四つに組む” (Gappuri yotsu ni kumu – be locked together in 4 ways) which was a new expression to me. It comes from Japanese martial arts, meaning to grab each other’s belts with both hands.

I talk further about omoiyari and Japanese customer service with Rochelle Kopp, founder of Japan Intercultural Consulting, in a podcast available here.

Hospitality in a time of coronavirus

Although President of the International Olympic Committee Thomas Bach kept reiterating that the Tokyo Olympics would go ahead in 2021 when he visited Japan recently, it’s hard to see how Japan will deliver on the promise it made when it won the Olympics bid, of omotenashi (wholehearted hospitality), if coronavirus waves keep surging.

We made a 3 minute video for Japan Intercultural Consulting unpicking what omotenashi actually means. The reality looks more like visitors being made to undergo regular temperature checks, policed for mask wearing and cheering too loudly and being regularly advised what areas to avoid due to overcrowding or too much particle dispersal.

It’ll feel like you never got past the jumpy guys yelling at you about filling in your forms and where to stand at the immigration queue in Narita Airport. Omotenashi and going the extra mile to please only really works when processes and expectations are predictable in the first place.

As this article in Wired points out, 70% of Japanese think the Olympics should be cancelled or postponed according to a recent poll, and it may also be that most of us have become too jumpy about being in a crowd to want to attend such an event anyway. It may come down to whether a reliable vaccine has become widespread enough for everyone to regain confidence before hosts can revert to old traditions of excellent Japanese customer service.

Why Germans are happier than the Japanese

Japanese people need to take longer holidays, is the answer to why Germans are happier than the Japanese, according to Japanese freelance journalist Toru Kumagai in his new book “Why do Germans feel rich on only Y2.9m (£20,000) a year?”

Japanese people see shopping as a leisure activity that they can do in just a few hours or a day for pleasure or stress release, and are too busy working. Germans can take holidays as they please, and will take 2 or 3 weeks off work at a time.

When Germans go on holiday, they will go to the seaside or countryside, with their family. In a recent insurance company survey, “sunshine and nature” was seen as the most attractive element of a holiday. Kumagai points out that as a Northern European country, Germany does not get as many hours of sunshine as Portugal or Southern France. So holidays are an important moment to refresh and recharge.

I’ve often thought that golf continues to be popular in Japan because it provides distant horizons and greenery. Respectable research in the West has shown a link between greenspace and mental health, although the causality is not yet clear. Although there is a lack of greenspace in Japanese cities, Japanese are good at taking mini breaks that let them refresh and recharge in natural surroundings, such as hiking in the mountains and staying in hot spring resorts.

Compared to Germany, there are far more advertisements and TV commercials aimed at selling something new and leading edge – whether it’s smartphones, beer or sweets, Kumagai notes. Japanese throw away old things even if they are still usable, as their homes are overflowing with new purchases. Whereas according to Kumagai, Germans will treasure old items and are used to buying second hand items. They are also very environmentally conscious and one of the major recycling nations of the world.

Kumagai also points the finger at the overservicing of customers in Japan, placing burdens on employees. He quickly adds that he doesn’t want German bad customer service to be imported into Japan, but just that Japan has gone too far in trying to please. For example, when you buy bread rolls in Japan, each one is put in a separate bag, and then all the bags put in another bag. If this kind of overservicing and customer expectations were reduced, Japanese workers could take longer holidays, Kumagai suggests.

Japanese consumers need to accept that a delivery might take a day longer, so more people can take Sundays off, or that delivery time windows will not be quite so narrow. Customers in Germany get thrown out of the shop when it’s closing time, but not in Japan.

I watched Spirited Away for the second time recently, which made me more aware of the environmental message in it – such as the river spirit spewing up old bicycles and trash. I also realised the Shinto element was a strong motif – the idea of spirits in natural things and the need to simplify life by not being unnecessarily greedy and accumulative. Much has been written, often snide, about the Shinto influence on Marie Kondo’s “spark joy” approach to decluttering, but as Kumagai says, Japan could benefit from a richer spiritual life if it went back to those Shinto ways (and also Buddhist) of not demanding so much and enduring so much in terms of long hours of work.

German workstyle versus Japanese customer convenience

You can’t have German workstyles and Japanese customer convenience, says Shion Amemiya, a 26 year old Japanese woman who has been living and working in Germany for 4 years and has now written a book about it. The book hits a nerve in Japan because of the pressure companies are under to reform their workplace cultures and cut back on overtime. Germany is often pointed to as an example of a thriving economy where people don’t do overtime and take plenty of holidays.

Germany has one of the highest overtime rates in the EU, she says in an article in the Toyo Keizai. Actually, looking at Eurostat’s 2018 figures, the UK has the highest number of hours worked per week per full time worker and Germany is somewhere in the middle.

She points out that Germans will do overtime, if there is work that needs to be finished, although there are more Germans who will stick to their rights and leave on time regardless then there are in Japan. But as she notes, those kinds of people will not be well evaluated by bosses or colleagues.

Overtime is worked in order to finish a job, and there is a lot less “face time” overtime in Germany than in Japan. Also, if overtime is worked on one day, Germans will then work fewer hours to compensate for this the next day, she observes.

As for holidays – she says what is great for the holiday taker is not so wonderful for the end user. She notes how in the summer, offices are empty, but that also meant that the local government officials, dentists and doctors she wanted appointments with were also away on holiday, and her favourite cafe was shut. Often, the person away is the person in charge, and nobody else can take care of their work while they are gone, and you are told to wait a month.

In Japan customers will insist on the person in charge being contacted even if they are on holiday, but in Germany she notes, customers and suppliers are seen as equals, with mutual rights – “I take a holiday, so I must accommodate other people taking holidays.”

Because people don’t take much holiday in Japan, it is a convenient country – shops are always open, the person in charge is always available. Just copying another country without realising the drawbacks is pointless. Japan needs to come up with workstyle changes that are appropriate to Japan, she concludes.

Exporting Omotenashi

It’s been a very tough few months for high street retail in the UK and elsewhere. Supermarkets, clothing brands and electronics have all had casualties in the UK. As always the disruptive effect of e-commerce is blamed. Rumours are swirling that even the UK upmarket supermarket chain Waitrose has been approached by Amazon as an acquisition prospect.

So maybe this is a good moment for Japanese retail and e-commerce companies to make another attempt to expand overseas, after the relative failure of Rakuten. Clearly Mercari thinks so, having just announced that it will enter the US market.

But rather than go down the disruptive route of simply undercutting prices online, I wonder whether Japanese companies could be more innovative in the service they provide, and find ways to bring the famous Japanese value of omotenashi to the world.

I shopped at the Cos (a Swedish mid market brand from the same company as H&M) flagship store in Regent’s Street in London recently. It was full of Chinese tourists but also local people, trying on piles of clothes. It was not a pleasant experience and most of the clothes had cosmetics stains on them. I wondered why anyone would buy anything and then realised that what the local people were doing was trying, and then buying the clothes online.

This makes it difficult to incentivise the shop assistants to give good service or keep the shop environment pleasant either through commission or through positive feedback, as there is little direct sense of achievement or impact on sales. But of course the physical customer experience has become even more crucial now if retailers with high street presence are to compete with pure online retailers.

This point was reinforced by the speaker at my local business women’s network. She has started an upmarket women’s fashion brand – £500 for vibrantly coloured tailor made dresses in Italian wool. It is a highly personal service and she says that she has also discovered that customers are willing to pay for her simply to spend an hour and a half with her.

We did wonder why she had made the effort to travel 2 hours to talk to us for free, considering we might not be rich enough to afford her dresses. And she was also kind enough to give me some free careers advice afterwards. I suppose it links back to what she said in her speech about one of her core values being to give, without expecting to receive anything back, at least at first. This is the deeper meaning of omotenashi. Not just the usual translation of “hospitality” but a selfless giving, which is why Japanese customer service is world famous.

I know some Japanese clothing companies like Start Today are trying to replicate excellent personalised service online. It would be great if Japanese companies in other sectors could do this physically as well as online outside of Japan. The UK certainly has plenty of empty shops available.

This article was originally published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News in 2018 and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s latest book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

Why “service” has different meanings in Japanese and English

A Japanese entrepreneur told me that his friends tried to discourage him from setting up a services company, because – they said – “Japanese customers won’t pay for service”. He said this in Japanese, and I assumed he meant “services” in the plural, which in English means work that would be included in the “service sector” of the economy, in other words not the agricultural or manufacturing sectors.

That really struck a chord with me, as I also sell “services” – namely consulting and training – to Japanese companies and I have occasionally noticed that Japanese people seem reluctant to pay for what we do. Despite this I have had a profitable business for over 15 years, probably because my actual client contacts at those Japanese companies are usually Europeans, and Europeans are much more accustomed to pay for consulting and training.

Transcribing and translating service

There is a translation issue here, because If in English, we use “service” without the “a” or use “the” instead – for example “pay for service”, or “how was the service?” we mean customer service. So I think that is where the confusion lies. Maybe what the entrepreneur’s friends were saying is that Japanese customers are not prepared to pay additionally for customer service. It is assumed in Japan that good customer service is automatic, and part of what you are already paying for.

How a concept is translated into another language often provides a clue as to how that concept is viewed in that culture. Particularly with Japanese, if the word only exists in katakana (a syllabic alphabet used for transcription of foreign language words), that may mean that concept does not really exist in Japan. Furthermore, the transcription into katakana of “service” (サービス sa-bisu) in Japanese not only means “service” in English, but has an additional meaning of being “a free thing”.

Solutions preferred to service in Europe

How to charge for a service is more complicated than charging for a product. It is a mixture of the hours involved and the expertise being bought. Recently, a potential customer told me that my company’s training was 50% more expensive than another supplier (whose main business was a language school). I said that this was the price we charged to customers in a similar situation to them and it was fair value for the expertise we had. I knew the language school would not have that expertise and indeed the customer ultimately chose us, despite our higher cost.

Above all, customers in Europe are willing to pay for services which solve a problem they have. So just telling them how high quality something is or how expert you are or how many hours it takes is not enough. This is why sales people for B2B services companies in Europe first of all try to build up trust with customers so they will tell them what their problems are. And also why it is more fashionable to use the word “solution” rather than “service” – this word implies they are getting an integrated product and service, which will fix their problem.

This article was originally published in Japanese and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

For more on Japanese companies as customers, see Pernille Rudlin’s book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

European pride + global standardization = long debates

The European senior management team of a business which had been newly acquired by a Japanese company complained to me about being treated as if Europe was one homogenous country, when in fact they only had offices in 5 very different countries in Europe, with a headquarters in Germany. “It’s true, we know how to work with each other in Europe – after all Europeans have been living and working together for hundreds of years, but it seems strange that on paper we’re supposed to be a tri-regional structure of Europe, North America and Asia, and yet North America has only two employees and Asia has no regional headquarters, with Taiwan, China, Korea and Japan being managed separately”

This was just a small company, but actually I have seen similar situations in many other much larger Japanese multinationals. It’s partly that Europeans are very sensitive to their status –and want to be treated on a par with other regional heads – and this means the European definition of regions, with Asia as one region.

But it’s also due to a justifiable concern that if the company is meant to be offering global products and services, it needs to have a well-balanced global structure operating off common platforms, systems and processes. If the company grows by acquisition, you often end up with very different portfolios of services and products from country to country, incompatible processes and systems and no clear idea of how revenue and costs should be shared across the regions which are contributing to the global offering.

This can cause huge, long running arguments, partly because standardizing trade, production processes and technology are interrelated issues. Once you decide what products and services are global and what are local, you have the basis for splitting revenue accordingly. But you have to be careful this does not lead to regional organisations focusing on their local products and services, refusing to participate in global contracts because they make more profit out of local contracts.

Once you know what you are offering globally, you can standardise the technology – such as having all the company’s websites running off the same content management system, or production running off the same platforms or sales and purchasing using the same global accounting system.

Sometimes Japan headquarters has to swallow their pride for the sake of speed and efficiency. I was impressed that Nomura, when it acquired Lehman Brothers, decided to move their dealing onto the Lehman platform, because they judged it to be technically superior and faster than trying to integrate platforms or shift everyone onto the Japanese system.

Nobody wants to deal with these problems because they are so complex and lead to fights and easy resistance by those claiming that the global standard is not going to work in their markets. But unfortunately, if you do not deal with these issues soon after an acquisition, they fester and become even more difficult to resolve.

This article was originally published in Japanese for the Teikoku Databank News and appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

The Rebirth of the Japanese Office Lady

About 20 years’ ago I wrote an article proclaiming the death of the Japanese Office Lady (OL). The company I was working at, along with many other Japanese companies at the time, had stopped hiring new graduates into the so-called “administrative” track, abolished the OL uniform, and encouraged existing OLs to transfer across to a management track. Future administrative needs would be filled by temporary agency workers.

I was quite pleased about these developments, as the old OL system offended my feminist sensibilities. The companies themselves had ended the OL system more for financial reasons. OLs were meant to join at age 20 or 22 and only stay in the company until their mid twenties, when it was expected they would leave to get married. In the meantime, they cleaned the desks, emptied the bins, made tea for the team, answered the phones and processed the team’s paperwork. By the mid 1990s, however, it became clear that more and more OLs were staying in the company into their late 30s, and due to the seniority-based pay scale, were being paid well over the odds for such basic administrative tasks.

A tough decade followed, for every young Japanese leaving university and trying to find a job, but especially for Japanese women who did not want to join a temping agency. Many joined foreign companies and some braved the management track of mainstream Japanese companies. It was tough for the women who were still in the administrative track too. They often ended up being paid less, as the quasi-management track they had been forced onto was not as seniority based as the administrative track they had been on. Almost all of them were working harder than ever before, as they were now having to manage teams of temporary staff. They had to train a constant stream of new temps, check their work and take the rap for any mistakes the temps made.

I was initially surprised to hear that the administrative track is now being reintroduced at my former company. Apparently the mistakes being made by temps and the strain on the remaining ex-OLs (many of whom who have now taken early retirement) are having a significant impact on the business.

On reflection, it should not have been a surprise. When I conducted a series of customer satisfaction survey interviews with Japanese companies last month, more often than not, the female administrative staff had also been invited to meet with me, and their (mostly male) managers were very careful to ask for their opinion and comments. The Japanese customers expected their criticisms of the administrative capabilities of the supplier company to be taken seriously. Administrative mistakes are not trivial in Japan. Not only are they seen as an indication that there may be problems elsewhere, but there is a view that a small slip can have major consequences.

I was being snobbish in viewing administrative tasks as demeaning, and declaring that it is sexist if women are assigned to such tasks. I doubt I am alone in this prejudice. I wonder how many Western companies would invite their secretaries to participate in customer satisfaction survey meetings.

Europe could really use a dose of Japanese-style customer service

I have to admit that I always suffer from reverse culture shock when I return to the UK after business trips to Japan. Arriving at Heathrow Airport I find my shoulders hunching up, ready to face the fact the inevitable headaches and the fact that at best I may get some cheery but incompetent service – and at worst, downright hostility – from the people delivering my “transportation experience”.

I know from the training seminars I do for Japanese expatriates who are working in Europe that they too put “bad customer service” near the top of the list of things they find most challenging about living here. In Japan you become used to a consistently high level of competence in customer service, delivered politely and gently, with immediate and unreserved apology should things go wrong. Most British people, even if they have never visited Japan, will agree that customer service standards are poor in the UK. Other Europeans, on hearing our criticisms, will usually add, “Try my country – it’s even worse!” European service is uneven in quality, often delivered with a bad attitude and when things go wrong, you get excuses rather than a straightforward apology.

The question Japanese expatriates ask – and the question I often ask myself, is – “why?” Why is customer service so bad in Europe, and if most people agree it is not satisfactory, why isn’t anything done about it?

I have been doing some research on the differences in Japanese and British corporate cultures recently, and I’ve realised that the key features I have identified can also be used to explain the different customer service outcomes. For example the corporate mission of British and Japanese companies and their historical roots has led to more “stakeholder” companies in Japan compared to more “shareholder” type of companies in the UK. This in turn has had an impact on the employees’ sense of belonging to a corporate group and collective responsibility.

Some of the more traditional – some might say “outdated” – aspects of Japanese companies also impact customer service. These would include seniority based promotion, with its roots in Confucian acceptance of unequal power in society and the obligations that go with different ranks, alongside respect for elders and higher ranked people. And although status is unequal, Japanese companies do not have a huge differential between the pay of the senior executives compared to the junior ranks, unlike British service companies where the junior person is notoriously badly paid and chief executives earn millions of pounds.

Finally, even in service sector companies in Japan there is the gembashugi factor or a focus on the actual place where the work is done. Senior managers should have worked their way up the organisation and be prepared to go out onto the shopfloor. There is even a kind of monozukuri or craftsmanship – pride in the physical aspects of delivering service well.

Perhaps, if the key elements in Japanese service excellence can be identified and made explicit, customer service can be Japan’s next big export industry?

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly. This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

Last updated by Pernille Rudlin at 2023-10-12.

Category: customer service