ICMI's Customer Management Insight - December 2007 - (Page 20) [IN THE CENTER] Achieving Excellence by Listening to Customers Yokohama Tire’s Consumer Affairs Contact Center attained worldclass performance through excellent relationships with its customers and being very receptive to their changing needs. Manager Karen Simmons recounts the steps involved. BY KAREN SIMMONS A Yokohama tire may appear to be a simple product, but it is not. Everyone who has seen them performing on the world’s top car racing circuits and rally venues knows that these tires are a stellar union of creativity, technology and experience. Creating them requires expertise, advanced materials, thorough testing and careful production to ensure that they perform as specified. Producing world-class tires requires applying the most advanced technologies, materials and production techniques. As important as these ingredients are, listening to our customers’ reactions to our tires is essential to our success as we create products that embody a shared vision of a quality experience that satisfies — even exceeds — expectations. EMBRACING OUR VISION TO EXCEED EXPECTATIONS To ensure that Yokohama is maintaining excellent relationships with and listening to its customers, five years ago we reviewed our Consumer Affairs practices to determine what gaps there might be between our actual practices and the world’s best. Soon we began adjusting our contact center operations to improve how we respond to customer inquiries. We recognized that we needed to embrace better ways to monitor and measure customer satisfaction. Adopting contemporary best practices would enable us to better measure our performance and our contribution to Yokohama’s success. At that time, the Consumer Affairs group applied only basic quality standards to our replies to consumer and customer inquiries. We didn’t record calls because we didn’t have the capability. Nor did we use a dedicated contact management system for Consumer Affairs. Rather, we were using a basic, out-of-the-box database program that proved awkward to use and difficult to maintain for our purposes. Moreover, the program offered restricted reporting capabilities. So we were at a crossroads. The time had come to embrace a new vision of how we should best contribute to Yokohama’s future. Our technical service manager, Daniel M. Guiney, explains our situation this way: “When I became accounticmi’s insight www.icmi.com | DECEMBER 2007 20 http://www.icmi.com
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