Recently I had a “healthy” salad I bought at Sunkus store. It was expensive for what it contained; gobo &c. But sometimes I feel guilty about what I eat and so chose a healthier option – which is often more expensive than the junk food!Anyway, looking at the ingredients – and by now I had eaten the salad – I saw that it contained “bleach”. What the hell is bleach doing in a salad? I was sure that it isn’t good for you, so I checked on the Internet; Wikipedia said “Most bleaches are hazardous if ingested or inhaled!” Sunkus, great marketing! Get any old trash, make it look good and charge a lot for it so people think that it’s good for them. Profits through the roof – our health through the floor!
The strong “earth-friendly” image of Starbucks has cracks in it. Their prepaid cards are not reusable? Eh! Why not? Short-sighted management decisions. When Starbucks introduced the cards some 15 years ago they didn’t think (again) of making them rechargeable. JR can do it. Aoki’s clothes store can do it, but it is beyond Starbucks. When you look at some of the poor food choices they have offered us over the years, I can imagine that their Japanese management is out of touch with customer needs and just copies and “localizes” what head office does (eg making the food portions smaller). I have had coffee at the flagship store in Seattle and wasn’t that impressed. It feels like an afterthought put there for the staff to use, definitely not an antenna shop. But they did have a good array of food and the staff was “scarily” over-friendly (well, you would be too if you thought that Howard [founder] might drop in at any moment). Last gripe: please stop shouting and repeating the orders, I go to have a “quiet” cup of coffee, not participate in a trading pit. Last last gripe: stop making the steam scream when the milk is being frothed, it is a terrible sound and totally unnecessary. Didn’t you learn that at Barrista school?
Recently Jonathan Restaurant held a “Stamp Rally” campaign, it is a low cost and sometimes effective way to boost sales. But the problem is that it is easy to lose/forget your card and then you are issued with another one. So, what’s my gripe? Jonathan’s will not let you add the points on partially filled cards to be able to redeem them. Why not? Because they are mean and petty. Also several of the restaurants in the chain are not participating in the campaign, so the consumer loses out again. Say I have 12 points on two cards, and that an average lunch costs Y750, that means I have spent Y9,000 with Jonathan’s, but because I feel I have been short-changed with their campaign policy I will now avoid their restaurant. So now instead of the point card bringing-in business it is actually turning it away. Don’t their marketing people know anything?
All foreigners in Japan love Costco. Not because it is the best or even the cheapest, but because it reminds them of home. A visit to Costco reminds me of how arrogant foreign companies can be when they come to Japan –like when Ikea crashed and burned in the 1970s. Have you looked at Costco USA’s homepage? It’s great, like you would except from a major corporation, it even offers to email people of special offers. So what about Costco Japan? The site is amateur. There are no products shown, no special offer push, and the maps are terrible. What this says (and Costco employees confirm this) is that they are not interested in the consumer market only the wholesale market. When you sign up, Costco doesn’t ask for an email address, so there are no emails of great offers. There is (hardly) no website, and no newsletter. After investing millions of dollars in their sites you’d think that they’d spend another couple of thousand dollars to do the marketing correctly. Many products on their shelves have no prices, the samples are broken and wine bottles are covered in dust. Metro Cash-and-Carry has three shops in the greater Tokyo area for wholesale trade only, and is aiming to open five more. But they deliver and they keep records on customers’ shopping patterns. They will soon take all of Costco’s wholesale market. And Costco will whine and lick its wounds. Carrefour, Boots and now Tesco have all got it wrong. Doesn’t anybody study before they come to Japan? (Actually Ikea did go home with its tail between its legs, it did its homework before entering the ring again and now it is a great success story). There’s a moral to this story somewhere …
Talk about being mean! I recently bought an air-conditioner made by Fujitsu. I bought the smallest size (also the cheapest) as I only needed to heat one six-mat room. Firstly, the salesman kept telling me that it had no power and wouldn’t heat the room – of course the salesman didn’t work for Fujitsu. But the catalogue said that machine was sufficient for that sized room and I believed the manufacturer’s data, even though it hadn’t been independently tested. So the salesman pissed me off by trying to sell me a more expensive unit, rather than sell me what I needed. When the unit was installed I found out that the remote control did not have a bracket to attach it to the wall. All the other models did, except the cheapest one. Which mean and miserable person at Fujitsu made that decision? How much are you saving the company? Y30? How much goodwill will that Y30 cost them?
What is it with NHK? Instead of understanding what people want, they just throw (taxpayers’) money at producers’ whims – these producers “fell out of the sky” (amakudari) from the Post Office or some government agency and are generally out of touch with what the public want. Instead they make idols out of immature children just because Yoshimoto Kogyo tells them to. Besides the fact that NHK competes (why?) with commercial sites by broadcasting sports all day long, what pisses me off (!) is the fact that NHK Educational channel broadcasts foreign films that have been dubbed! What is educational about that?! I have lots of gripes about NHK! Here’s another one: why does NHK use so many transvestites in its programmes? Is this the image that the Foreign Ministry wants the world to see of Japan? Miwa Akihiro? Give me a break!
I don’t know who runs WoWoW, but I wish I did! They have the opportunity to make something really good, but they stop halfway. According to the Japan Statistics Bureau there are about 2 million foreigners living in Japan, of which half use English as a first or second language. I would have thought that this represents a large market, but WoWoW doesn’t think so. Why? Because their monthly magazine has nearly zero English in it, and if you can’t read Japanese, it would be nearly impossible to understand the programming. Secondly, I have been a subscriber to WoWoW for about 17 years, nearly from the beginning (I think the service is 20 years old now), but do they reward my loyalty? No. Nothing. There are no benefits or rewards – they gave me a membership card when I joined, but it has no meaning. Thirdly, it annoys me to see sports dominate their programming – they have three channels (for which I’m charged extra) but each channel often has the same programmes! Please dedicate one channel to films, one to music and one to sports. What could be easier? And please stop wasting our fees by making third rate dramas! Thank you!
I recently bought a digital hard-drive for my TV from Sanyo, it came with a 160 page manual, of which 40% was just about how to connect the device. Manuals in Japan are nearly always very poorly written, they are not written from the point of view of the user but from the engineer’s point of view, so they have too much detail and are hard to understand. This Sanyo manual was no different. Even though my blog is in English, I do read Japanese, but this manual was too complicated. So I phoned the customer support for help. Together we setup the hard-drive, but it took the lady in customer service one hour to get it to work. If everyone who buys an iVR from Sanyo phones customer service it might bankrupt the company! It now works very well, but the software interface is also designed very badly, it is not user friendly! (Have you heard of that word?) Don’t companies ever listen to their customers? Let the users design products not engineers!
Update: a week later Sanyo sent me another manual of 40 pages - it seems that they forgot to pack it with the machine! But it was no clearer than the first two!
Update: a week later Sanyo sent me another manual of 40 pages - it seems that they forgot to pack it with the machine! But it was no clearer than the first two!
Here’s a picture of an ad by Chiyoda-ku; I believe it costs a lot of money to advertise on JR, at least Y1,000,000. That is 1) design Y100,000 2) printingY400,000 and 3) placement Y500,000. This is just a guess – it could be more. And the ad only lasts one month. This is a disgrace! If the library wants more visitors, it should make the library a better experience. How about a coffee shop, or free Internet or events, or spend the Y1,000,000 on books that people want? But don’t waste public money where it won’t make a difference. My library in Itabashi has a poor selection of Western books, no Internet, no coffee. I once asked to order a book, a standard work on Japanese calligraphy, but they refused saying that it wasn’t in any of the libraries in Itabashi. So? Get it from another library in another ward, or buy it. That’s what public money is for – not pretty ads in trains. Libraries are public services not businesses – so please emphasize the service!
Complaints v's Gripes
Here are some statistics from a Complaint Management consultant:
· Only 5-10% of customers bother to complain, for every 1 complaint captured, 26 go unreported
· Complaints captured within an organisation are usually just the tip of the ice-berg
· 68% of customers defect due to a perceived attitude of indifference toward them by the company or staff
· A rapid resolution to a complaint improves the chances of customer retention by 26%
· 65% of customers expect complaints in person to be dealt with immediately
· A ・1%increase in customer satisfaction can create a 4% increase in revenue per year
That last figure is fantastic! So why don’t companies wake up and INVITE a dialogue with their customers?