Customer Service: Central to Our Success
Our entire business philosophy is based on excellent customer service.
As a mail-order health supplement company, handling orders and responding to feedback are of utmost importance to us. We have smiling voices and respond to every letter, postcard, and email because we value our customers more than anything.
A Smiling Call Center
Our call center is filled with smiling voices. What we mean is that when our employees talk on the phone, they smile, even though the customer cannot see them. Smiling is important in face-to-face communication, and we believe it is equally important on the phone. We want to speak as if the customer is right in front of us. And we value the correspondence with our customers, and consider it our best mode of customer service as a mail-order company.
Another value we have is gratitude. The very first words we say when answering the phone are “Thank you.” Rather than your typical “thank you for calling,” we say kansha shitemasu, which translates to something like “we are grateful” in English. After that we say our company name and our personal name.
Responding to Every Single Letter, Email, and Phone Call
We receive about 3000 letters and postcards from our customers every month. On good days, we get over 200 per day.
We write a response to every single message in the same medium as it arrived. If a customer sends us a handwritten letter, we respond with a handwritten letter. If it’s an email, we reply with an email. If they call us on the phone, we answer. We send a reply to all messages within 24 hours.
When WAKASA SEIKATSU was founded, President Kenichi Kakutani always responded to all feedback and orders with a handwritten letter. This tradition still continues, even as our business has evolved, so that we respond to our customers using the same medium they used to communicate with us.
Above are some examples of letters we have written to our customers. The character in the middle is our blueberry mascot, Buruburu-kun.
Listening to Customer Feedback
Once, a customer contacted us about a supplement package that got wet and torn in the rain. As a result, we changed the packaging in our supplements to a more durable material that holds up better in the rain.
Another time, some customers said that they wanted to take our BLUEBERRY-EYE supplement, but they had trouble swallowing the normal-sized capsules. In response, we created a new product with smaller BLUEBERRY-EYE capsules.
And this very website was built in response to customer feedback. One of our customers wanted to tell their friends abroad about us and our products, so we created an English homepage for that purpose.
To us, feedback is a fortune that money can’t buy.
We hold weekly meetings to review customer feedback and decide what improvements to make based on it. At least one representative from all of our departments takes part, as these decisions affect the entire company. Sometimes the discussions can last for hours.
Customer feedback is essential to us. We improve our services and products based on it. That in turn make our customers happy, and we receive lots of thank yous and positive messages because of it. Happy customers make us happy and even more motivated.