Wacoal Customer Service Center
•Building a relationship of trust with customers
To remain a company loved and trusted by our customers, we place the utmost importance on communication. On behalf of the company, the Customer Service Center listens attentively to the voices of our customers and responds sincerely to their needs and desires through effective communication.
We value each and every customer. We believe that meeting their needs with sincerity is our obligation and the key to gaining their trust.
A range of inquiries
Our Customer Service Center receives nearly 60,000 calls (inquiries and complaints about products and stores) from our customers annually.
Of these, the majority are inquiries about product inventory, special product characteristics, stores dealing in particular items and requests for information or materials, while complaints concerning products, sales staff and promotional campaigns etc. amount to 10%. Whether they are inquiries or complaints, we try to promptly provide customers with the information they need and offer thorough explanations, while always putting ourselves in the customer’s place.
We will continue our efforts to reduce customer complaints concerning products and sales staff by encouraging each store to work to improve customer service, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and a feeling of solidarity with our company.
Hints for improvement abound in customer complaints
There are many hints for improvement contained in the complaints from customers. The important thing is whether we notice such hints or not. The hints contained in customer complaints are “hidden gems,” but if we overlook those hints and fail to make use of them to improve our products and services, we will not be able to achieve customer satisfaction.
Once we received many complaints concerning a particular product line. To handle those problems, we asked customers who filed complaints to act as monitors. As a result, we were able to obtain valuable hints for improvement of our products. From this experience, we have learned that the role of the Customer Service Center is not to “handle customer complaints well,” but rather to listen sincerely to what customers say and “notice the messages of support and encouragement for Wacoal” contained in their complaints and “convey those messages throughout the company.”
Customer feedback
The Customer Service Center prepares a monthly report summarizing the complaints received from customers during the month, and presents it at an internal quality assurance meeting to be shared among the participants. When necessary, the Center liaises with the relevant departments or units to collaboratively develop solutions from the customer’s perspective.
Customer inquiries and complaints (with personal information omitted for privacy) are posted on the intranet “Customer Voice,” so that the information can be viewed by all employees.
Many of the customer calls to the Center are inquiries regarding products, but there are also complaints about products and the attitude of individual sales staff towards customers. When receiving a complaint about customer service manners, the Center contacts the relevant store to confirm the problem and instruct the store manager to provide training to improve the service attitude of the sales staff. When receiving suggestions from customers regarding improvements to our products, the Center liaises with the product development-related departments to ensure that customer suggestions are taken into account to develop products that please customers. As part of our efforts to further improve the quality of customer inquiry responses, we station at the Customer Service Center expert staff with professional knowledge and qualifications such as “Intimate Advisor*,” “Textiles Evaluation Specialist” or “Advisory Specialist for Consumer Affairs” to speedily respond to customer inquiries and resolve them effectively.
In fiscal 2009, Wacoal was awarded a three-star rating (the only one in the apparel industry) by the Help Desk Institute (HDI), a rating agency for customer support service.
?Intimate Advisor: Nihon Body Fashion Association’s certification program to certify the expertise and skills of professionals engaged in sales of body fashion and those involved in the body fashion industry.
Report
In 2005, a product recall occurred after a flaw was discovered in two types of the camisole brassiere NAMI NAMI, which was released in the spring of that year. Some products could not be worn because the hook became detached from the cloth of the brassiere. Immediately after the problem was discovered, we established a special customer inquiry desk to handle this problem and recalled all these products. In addition, a number of other serious problems have occurred that can damage customer trust, such as product mislabeling and mislabeling of country of manufacture.
We sincerely apologize to customers inconvenienced by these problems. We are determined to further strengthen our quality control system to prevent recurrence of similar problems and restore customer confidence.
SQUASH System —Quick response to customer voices—
The SQUASH system, introduced in 2004, facilitates speedy information relay & sharing and quick responses to customer needs. The SQUASH system gathers customer feedback and beauty advisor’s comments from each store on a weekly basis, and relays them to the Head Office, where the relevant department (e.g. Product Development Dept.) promptly develops countermeasures which are then reported back to each store.
The name “SQUASH” is derived from the initials of the four words: Speed, Question, Answer and Shift. Every week, the Head Office receives store information from almost all beauty advisors.
The Retail Store Coordinators, Merchandising Department and Distribution Department will review information sent from stores and work to develop and improve products reflecting customer opinions and to improve the level of customer service at stores.
In the future we will strive to improve response speed. We also believe it important to expand the use of BA Study Groups to more effectively reflect beauty advisors’ opinions in product development, and to have the Head Office staff (Merchandising Department, etc.) visit stores to deepen their understanding of the actual sales sites.
