Initiatives

In recent years, with the aging of society, with product functions increasing in number and complexity, and with the spread of catalog sales and other non-store sales, there is also an increasing number of inquiries from customers about which products to buy and how to use them.

Our response to these inquiries does not end when that customer's questions are answered. We use these customer inquiries to analyze our products and find out why they may be difficult to use or understand, and then we use this information to improve our manuals and catalogs, and improve the next products we produce. This information is also used to improve management. These are called Voice of the Customer (VOC) activities.

Companies like AVC Networks Company-producer of plasma televisions and digital cameras-and Panasonic Communications Company Limited-producer of facsimiles and telephones-are leading the industry in global VOC activities, and these activities have received high praise outside the company as well. To help spread these results company wide, the Corporate VOC Committee was established in January 2007.

This committee shares best practices of the development, production, sales, and services divisions with other members, introduces new mechanisms for incorporating market feedback into the manufacturing process, and works to improve customer satisfaction by actively promoting other lively activities.

A briefing was held in October 2007 to hear reports on various activities such as quality improvement, function improvement, and manual improvement, and share the actions taken throughout the company.

AVC Networks Company (AVC) is an industry pioneer in Voice of the Customer (VOC) activities. VOC activities collect feedback from customers from all over the world for use in product development and design, in an effort to predict or detect quality problems quickly and to improve our products accordingly.

We also work closely with service and repair companies to get feedback from their engineers and thus be able to take quick action when problems arise. We call this the Voice of the Engineer activities.

From both VOC and VOE activities, we can "see the voice of the people" and implement different initiatives to build products with the customer's input, leveraging this valuable voice of experience.

We have also been using audio-visual aids to explain the use of our rapidly evolving digital products so that they are easier to understand for the customers. One example is the digital manuals provide via our website. Last year, the manual for our flat-screen television Viera and DVD recorder Diga, multi-media instructions for connecting and setting up equipment, and operating the equipment won the 2007 Japan Manual of the Year award (*1).

AVC's efforts to expand its contact with customers around the world is being highly praised outside the company as well, winning the CRM Best Practice Award (*2) for three years running, and the Contact Center Award (*3).

1. While implementing the initiatives given by the government to protect consumer safety, such as the implementation of the Amended Consumer Appliance Product Safety Law, which requires reporting of serious product accidents, we are doing the following:

   a. Respond to customers faster than before, comply with laws, and be diligent in performing our activities.
   b. Release the necessary information to the customer, and deal with customers justly and fairly.

2. Initiatives for the safety and security of customers

   a. To improve product quality, promote the use of repair information
   b. Strengthen initiatives around the VOC Committee, whose purpose is to have the entire company work to employ customer feedback into our manufacturing process

3. Amend Basic Regulations for Customer Relations based on JIS Q10002(ISO10002) Quality management -- Customer satisfaction -- Guidelines for complaints handling in organizations, and implement a high standard of customer service uniformly company wide while actively engaging the customer to get feedback and reflect this feedback in management.

These efforts and initiatives were reinforced, and all attendees swore to perform their daily operations with the customer's point of view in mind.

To impove the quality of customer service, Panasonic sets numerical targets for type of response, response rate, immediate response rate, and customer satisfaction, and these are maintained as KPI.

In Japan in fiscal 2007, the General Contact Center was established to improve the customer satisfaction rate.

To improve the skills of the call center staff, the Consultant License System was established. In this system, a skill level index is used to assign credentials to call center staff.

*1 Overall indicator that sums the response content, answer rate, immediate answer rate. Introduced in fiscal 2007
*2 Evaluation indicator provided by third-party evaluating organization