The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

By: Dr. Greg Story
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  • Summary

  • For succeeding in business in Japan you need to know how to lead, sell and persuade. This is what we cover in the show. No matter what the issue you will get hints, information, experience and insights into securing the necessary solutions required. Everything in the show is based on real world perspectives, with a strong emphasis on offering practical steps you can take to succeed.
    copyright 2022
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Episodes
  • How To Provide Great Customer Service

    How To Provide Great Customer Service
    Aug 4 2024
    Great service is so fleeting and illusive. You encounter it and then like the morning mist, the next minute it is gone. One company representative is so spectacularly helpful and then next one is seemingly possessed by evil spirits and demonic. As companies how do we get the angels inside our staff to engage with the clients, rather than having reputation destroying devils intrude. Good service, consistently delivered, is no accident and so it has to be made to occur. How can we do that? Jan Carlzon many years ago published a tremendous guide to customer service. He had the job of turning around SAS airlines and captured that experience in his book “Moments Of Truth”. Carlson’s insights flooded back to me when I checked into a hotel in Singapore. By the way, the drive in from Changi Airport is a credit to the Singaporean Government, who spend millions every year to develop and maintain their landscaped, leafy, green, tropical thoroughfares. This is smart. You are already in a pleasant mood just getting into town. While going through the check-in process at the hotel, a waiter from the adjoining restaurant approached me bearing an ice-cold glass of freshly squeezed juice. Singapore is very humid and trust me, after a long flight, that ice cold beverage went down very well. I thought this is really well thought through customer service by this Hotel. One of Carlzon’s observations about customer service however was the importance of consistency of delivery. For example, visualise the telephone receptionist answering your call in a pleasant, helpful manner and you are uplifted by your exposure to the brand. The next staff member receiving the transferred call however, is grumpy, disinterested and unfriendly. Instantly, your mood and positive impression plummet. You are suddenly irritated by this company, who have just damaged their brand by their lack of an ability to sustain good service across only two consecutive touch points with the customer. How do you feel when you are given the run around from department to department? So back to my story. As I get to my room, in good spirits after unexpectedly receiving my ice-cold juice, I find out the television isn’t working. After a forensic search for the cause, including a few harsh words with the television controller, I discover the power is not on. There is a card slot next to the door that initiates the power supply to the room. Actually, I discovered the same system in the elevator, when I unsuccessfully tried to select my floor. Yes, I worked it all out eventually, but the thought occurred to me that the pleasant, busy young woman checking me into the hotel, failed to mention these two salient facts to me. Sustainability of good service has to be the goal if you want to protect or grow your brand. Let me mention a customer service breakdown I particularly dislike here in Japan. When you call just about any organization here, you get a very flat voice answering the phone saying in Japanese ,“XYZ company here”. You ask to speak with that very excellent and impressive member of staff, Ms. Suzuki whom you met recently. The flat uninterested voice tells you that she “is not at her desk right now” and then you are abandoned to stone cold motherless silence. The “may I take down your name and phone number so that she can call you back” bit is rarely offered. Instead, you are left hanging on the phone. The inference of the silence is that if Ms. Suzuki is not around, that is your problem buddy and you should call back later, rather than expect a return call. Again, to Carlzon’s point, these inconsistencies of customer service directly damage the brand. In this example, when I had previously met Ms. Suzuki, I was impressed by her and consequently I had a good impression of the whole organisation. I was projecting that positive vibe to the entire company. The person taking the call has just put that positive image of the brand to the sword. When you are the leader of your company, you presume that everyone “gets it” about representing the brand and that the whole team delivers consistent levels of service. You expect that your whole team is supporting the marketing department’s efforts to create an excellent image of the organization. After all, you have been spending truckloads of money on that marketing effort, haven’t you? But are all the staff supporting the effort to build the brand? Perhaps they have forgotten what you have said about consistent customer service in the past or they are a new hire or a part-timer who didn’t get properly briefed. I heard one of my recent hires in the sales team answering the phone with an unhelpful tone in his voice. He actually sounded like he was angry. He was in his fifties, so no boy, but obviously that had been his standard, ugly phone manner throughout his entire working life. A perpetual brand killer, client ...
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    14 mins
  • Business Lessons Straight From The Karate Dojo

    Business Lessons Straight From The Karate Dojo
    Jul 28 2024
    I have often thought there are so many lessons from the martial arts for our businesses. Here are my musings after 50 plus years of training in traditional Shitoryu Karate. Stepping on to the floor The dojo is the ultimate equalizer. Whether you arrived by chauffeur driven Roller or took Shanks’s mare, once you step on to that dojo floor only your ability and character separates you from everyone else. You have had all of your wealth, privileges, educational background, society status, connections stripped away and you are left alone to rise or fall based on your own abilities. In business, we forget this primary lesson and allow people to accrue titles, status and power unattributed to their abilities. We need to see beyond the spin and politics and ensure that people’s real abilities are recognized and rewarded. Starting The class begins with a short meditation interval. This is designed to focus the mind and separate the day from what is to come. Next everyone is bowing toward the front. The front of the class represents all who came before us. We are not here today based solely on what we have done. Others were here before us building the art and the organization. By bowing we acknowledge the continuum and our responsibility to keep it going. Now we bow to the teachers, respecting their knowledge and their devotion. Finally, we bow to each other expressing our solidarity as fellow travelers on a journey of self-discovery. How do we start the work day? Is there a chorei or morning gathering of the work group, to get everyone aligned and focused on the WHY we are there. In our office we review one of the Dale Carnegie Principles each day. We then share our scheduled meetings, our highest goals for the day, end with a motivational quote and a final rousing call to all do our best (ganbarimashoo!). Stretching We warm-up our minds and our bodies by going through a set routine to stretch our muscles to be able to operate at the highest possible levels of performance. If you are a sales team, are you beginning your day with role play practice and coaching or are you just practicising on the client? Basics We repeat the same drills over and over, every class, every year, forever. We are seeking purity of form and perfection of execution. We are aiming for absolute efficiency and economy of movement. We are preparing ourselves for a Zen state where we can react without pre-thought. A large amount of our work is routine, but can we improve the systems, the execution to bring in greater efficiencies and achieve higher productivity? Sparring There are two formats. Prearranged sparring dictates what is coming and the order in which it comes. Free sparring is one hundred percent spontaneous, ebbing and flowing with the rhythm of ploy and counter ploy. At a high level, this is like playing a full chess match in under one minute, but using our physical techniques with total body commitment. When we compete in the marketplace are we a speedboat or an oil tanker? Are we nimble, adaptive, on purpose and aware of market changes? Are we thinking steps ahead of the opposition, anticipating their moves and constantly outflanking them, applying our brains and speed over their brawn? Kata These are full power set pieces, representing a battle against multiple opponents. The forms are fixed and the aim is perfection. The form is set and so we can release the mind into a Zen state enabling us to go beyond the form. Are we able to keep reproducing execution pieces of our work that are perfected? Can we refine our actions for the maximum effectiveness? Can we eliminate mistakes, defects and rework entirely at all levels in the organisation? Strengthening and warming down Strength training is there to build the physical power and our mental perseverance. We do a final stretch to reduce stiffness and muscle pain by reducing lactic acid build up in the muscles. Are our training methodologies making us stronger than our rivals in the marketplace? Are we allocating sufficient time to grow our people? Are we seeing outcomes from the training time invested. Finish We repeat the bowing and this time we add our Values. We voice carefully chosen words which represent the value system of our dojo, (Effort, Patience, Moderation, Respect). These are the last things setting into our minds, before we go back to our normal routines. How do we end the workday? Do we set up for the next day by reviewing what we did today, what we achieved and what we need to work on tomorrow? Do we reflect on the quality of our performance and think about ways to do better? The system of the martial arts hasn’t changed all that much over the many centuries and for a very simple reason. It works. How about your company? Are you perfecting your systems for the ages?
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    12 mins
  • 320 Client Contact Insights

    320 Client Contact Insights
    Jul 21 2024
    Japan is merciless with salespeople. When you call the client’s company everyone is doing their absolute best to make sure you don’t get to talk to the boss. They won’t tell you their name, they don’t offer to take a message for you, the whole vibe is “get lost”. If you don’t know the precise name of the person you want to speak with, then the wall of steel descends very quickly. They will question you as to why you want to speak to the person in charge, tell you that the person will call you back. They never will. No one wants to take any responsibility in the Japanese system, so that is why they won’t share their name. They don’t want to get scolded by the boss, so that is why they won’t put you through. The boss is a salaried employee and they won’t take calls from people they have never heard of. They don’t think, “this might be a business opportunity that will help my company”. They think, “I don’t want to have to deal with people I don’t know, especially foreigners, because it is risky”. Risk aversion is a big thing here and the easiest way of never taking a risk is never doing anything new or different. It has worked for thousands of years here. So how do we break through the steel barrier. Many companies have meetings on Monday mornings, so invariably no one is around to take the call, even presuming you know their name. The last day of the month is also a very busy day for many companies, so that is another hard one. Days with a five in the date called gotoobi (5th, 10th,15th, 25th) are also busy days in Japan because they are cut off dates for invoice submissions, monthly invoice payments, salary payments, Government department submission dates, etc. If we want to call a company and we don’t know the person’s name, then we should try and do it before the gate keepers arrive for work or after they have left for lunch or for after they have departed at the end of the day. This is not fool proof, but the chances of talking with someone with a bit more authority goes up. Those tasked with taking general calls to the company or section, are usually female, young and at the very, very bottom of the hierarchy with no authority, except to make your life a misery. Companies don’t understand that these staff are the bearers of the brand to the outside world, so invariably they are not properly trained. They think their job is to screen out all salespeople and all unknowns. I called the new President of a major Italian brand here in Tokyo to say hello and thank him for his business, as we had been commissioned by his headquarters to provide training for them. I didn’t know his name because he had just arrived and that information was not public at that point. I could never get past the gatekeeper. She would always tell me he wasn’t available and that he would call me back. That never happened. I am the President of the company delivering training for his company, to develop his business, to help hit his targets. You would expect he would want to talk with me. No such luck. In the end, I got so frustrated, I just gave up trying to talk to him and left the training delivery logistics to my staff. I never did meet him in fact and he was posted to a new country. Here are some ideas. Even if you don’t know the name of the person send a package to their title within the company. This package might contain your company brochure or a small gift, but whatever it is, preferably make it slightly bulky to excite curiosity. Then, when you call asking for them, mention to the gatekeeper that you want to follow up on the package you recently have sent to them. That package, by the way, once received by the target will probably go straight into the waste paper bin sitting next to their desk, unread, possibly unopened, because they don’t know who you are. This “send the package then call” technique will slightly increase your chances of getting put through. Try to make the call before 9.00am, after lunch at around 1.10pm and again after 6.00pm. The junior people will usually arrive around 9.00am or 9.30am. They will have to man the phones from 12.00pm while all the important people go to lunch. This means you have a slightly better chance of talking to the boss when they are back from lunch and the junior person is not there. Companies are more concerned these days about junior, non-manager staff working overtime, so the junior people will be gone after 5.00pm or 5.30pm. The managers however are still there. Obviously the same considerations apply if you know the person’s name. Your chances of connecting will go up. If you have met them before, you can say that you are calling to follow on with them on that recent conversation you had. Or you are calling to follow up on that email that you have sent them. Or that you are calling to get an answer to your question in the email you sent to...
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    12 mins
Management Economics
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