Oct. 10, 2017
Human Resource Development for Customer Orientation
Suntory Group strives to gain trust from our customers by consistently exceeding expectations. This stems from our spirit of customer orientation, a belief that has been passed down since our founding and is integral to our way of working.
This belief was stipulated as a "Voluntary Declaration toward Consumer Orientation," and released in 2017. The declaration includes a statement, "We will nurture corporate culture and awareness take action from customers' viewpoint," showing our companywide dedication to human resource development, which aims to raise the awareness of all employees about topics relating to customer orientation. We hold multiple lectures including a Customer-Oriented Mindset Development course for newly appointed managers, but the focus of this article centers around the Customer's Perspective Brush-up Seminar.
Link: Announced New Initiatives to Become Even More Customer Oriented
Suntory Communications Limited
Yoko Takano, Customer Relations Division
Our Customer's Perspective Brush-up Seminar is conducted every year as a mandatory seminar for all employees. The purpose of this seminar is to enable each employee to evaluate their perspective on the customer and make actionable plans about what they can do to contribute to our customers' satisfaction.
The seminar begins with a message and question from the management to the employees, "What can we do for the customers?" By sharing real feedback from our customers, employees gain a better understanding of our customer's expectations, and develop best practices for how they must think and act in order to offer an even better customer experience.
The seminar focuses around real case studies from employees who have taken action using this customer-oriented thinking after reflecting on their work and realizing that there are oftentimes gaps between customer expectations and the actual situation. We conducted interviews with the employees from the case studies and people involved to help our employees learn how to put customer-oriented thinking into action.
 |  |
We've been conducting this Customer Orientation seminar for more than 10 years, updating the curriculum to reflect recent trends and changes in customer needs. We will continue to actively solicit customer feedback, striving for our employees to maintain their customer-oriented mindset and deliver excellent customer service.