When There Is a Real Costumer Service…

This year, once again, the Shiseido Customer Service Center has been awarded three stars, the top rating, in the Quality Monitoring category of the 2014 Customer Service Center assessment sponsored by HDI-Japan. HDI-Japan is the Japanese branch of the Help Desk Institute (HDI), based in the U.S. and one of the world’s leading organizations in the customer support service industry.

For the Quality Monitoring category, customer service representatives’ telephone records are assessed by judges on a scale of one to four, looking at the service system, communications, service skills, handling processes and procedures, and capabilities in dealing with complicated issues. Customer service representatives are evaluated for their commitment to providing service from the customer’s perspective. Only a small percentage of the companies assessed were awarded three stars. In the Quality Monitoring category, Shiseido is the first company in the Japanese cosmetics industry that has won the top rating for two consecutive years.

It’s Shiseido Customer Service Center representatives’ specialized expertise in providing wholehearted service and extra care in putting themselves in the customer’s shoes that have enabled the center to attain such high acclaim.  HDI, having approximately 50,000 members, is one of the world’s leading international institutes in the customer support service industry. About 90 percent of the companies ranked in the Fortune Global 500 list are members of HDI.

With hundreds of corporate memberships, HDI-Japan, the Japanese branch of HDI, ranks and evaluates corporate customer service centers in order to improve support services. Shiseido established the Customer Service Facility in 1968. Thereafter, the framework was reorganized as a Consumer Information Center for the collecting and analyzing of customer feedback. The center has continued these efforts to provide quality customer service and share key information within Shiseido.

The Consumer Information Center improved a system that had been in use since 1996 to introduce a new customer support system in April 2011 called the “Mirror system”, where customer feedback can be shared in real time. Currently, 20 countries and regions across the world, including Japan, utilize the system to consolidate information regarding the status of customer inquiries.

Furthermore, Shiseido has customer support service personnel all across Japan to provide prompt customer service. The representatives are striving to handle risk issues, develop and improve products and cosmetic information, and enhance their services. In particular, they extract important and useful information from customer feedback, swiftly send that information to corporate or appropriate divisions in charge of sharing, and continuously track feedback for problem resolution.