Customer Practices Of Global Leaders

Customer focus at Honda

• Honda Motor was founded in 1948. It began as a motorcycle company and has grown to become the largest producer and seller of motorcycles in the world. Honda entered the automobile business in 1963 - making it the youngest among the 11 manufacturers in the Japanese industry.

• Today it has 88 factories world over and 10 million customers are buying Honda products globally.

Customer focus at Honda

Philosophy of 3 joys

The company believes that it is imperative to establish a trust relationship in which employees and customers can share a common joy through the experience of the service and products which Honda provides. They call it the philosophy of “3 joys”.

“3 Joys”

Honda works to ensure that their products results in 3 joys :

Joy for people who buy them Joy for those who sell them and Joy for people who produce them

Quality objective

“Maintaining an international viewpoint, we are dedicated to supplying products of the highest efficiency yet at a reasonable price for worldwide customer satisfaction”.

Customer focus - a common target

Each individual shares a common target of meeting customer expectations. The organization integrates the capabilities of every employee to accomplish the assignment, without big variance between plan and result. In other words, every one is trained to pursue the highest efficiency and effectiveness.

The company requires every individual to set a common target based on customer’s viewpoint - and a customer focus practice. The customers here do not necessarily mean consumers or external customers. In daily operations any associates linked through the job are customers. In order to achieve the target every one adopts the procedure called PDCA. ( Plan-Do-Check-Action)

Customer focus

PDCA

The basic principle of TQM at Honda is to narrow the gap between the “Target” and “Status-quo”. In order to achieve the target the company makes the initial plan, implements the plan, analyzes the outcome of the implementation and recognizes a new problem and finally improves the process of operation. When the company progresses through one cycle of PDCA, the gap between the target and the status quo becomes narrower. The process is repeated till the plan is achieved.

American Express

Amex: Conditions of customer listening

• It must serve to identify customers and determine their requirements.

• It must define measures of success with which the performance of Amex can be judged

• It must indicate the extent of customer satisfaction in absolute terms as well as relative to its competitors

Amex: Customer expectation determination

• Market research teams

• Customer group/segmentation

• Competitive analysis/ differentiating factors

• Environmental scan

• New products / emerging market research

Amex: Customer relationship management

• Developing Relationship strategies

• Access to customer

• Continuous Customer feedback

• Conducting Transaction based surveys

• Establishing Customer focus groups

• Conducting lost customer analysis

• Employee feedback

Amex: Customer satisfaction determination

• Customer satisfaction measurement

• Competitive comparisons

• Dissatisfaction analysis

• Post -installation survey

• Listen to customer continuously and not at discreet intervals.

• Keep comment cards at high volume locations.

• Use feedback to identify new segments and customer expectations

• Design varying customer listening devices for different needs.

Amex : Customer focused practices

• Convert every point of customer interaction into a listening point.

• Use feedback to update, monitor and correct complaints.

• Come out with new products to meet the expectations.

Amex : Customer focused practices

• Process each transaction with speed, accuracy and consistency.

• Use technology to speed up communications and cut cycle-time.

• Delegate specified decision making powers down the line.

Amex : Customer focused practices

FICCI CE