Japan

As mentioned in the Introduction to this book, the results of the Japanese study sponsored by Ogilvy One were coming in as this book went to press. In this section, we summarize the results that arrived literally the day before this book went to press, and draw some early conclusions. A more comprehensive report will be issued later. Meanwhile, the reader will have more time than the authors did and may wish to make further comparisons.

Interviews were carried out with 20 leading companies, the majority being in the top 10 for their sector. Sectors were as follows:

six financial services;
six services;
six manufacturers;
two communication services.

Interviews were with senior managers: the board-level director responsible for CRM, marketing/sales/strategic planning heads or CRM operations heads.

The average score for the Japanese study was 35 out of 100. This score was lower than the global average score (at time of completion of the study) for CMAT-R studies of 51. Among the three industry sectors, financial services had the highest score while manufacturing scored the lowest: more or less consistent with global studies, reflecting heavy intermediation and/or product focus in manufacturing and tough competition for customers in financial services.

The range of results for individual companies was large, from over 61 per cent to as low as 13 per cent. The results are given in Table 3.3. The highlights are as follows:

The research found companies that have good CM practices in many areas, and companies that have hardly started to implement customer management. Typically the best companies are those that have been doing CM for many years and have imported international learning.
The definition and standardization of processes is reasonably good in many organizations; however these are designed around efficiency and internal structures, rather than customers.
Seventy per cent of organizations have standard processes and measurement for inquiry and complaint handling, but only 15 per cent check customer acceptability of their customer management processes.
Most of the companies surveyed collected individual customer data, but no organizations were using it fully to plan and drive their CM activity. Most organizations had never undertaken any real depth analysis of their data, and few use it to target valued customers differentially, or to develop and retain customers.
Most CM activity was in response to customers' actions, rather than approaching customers proactively. Eighty per cent do not have specific development programmes for valuable customers.
Ownership at board level is relatively high in Japan compared to the global picture. However, typically the vision amounts to broad customer focus, rather than a specific CM mission. Also there is low alignment further down the organization and at the front line.

The top seven performing areas were customer management ownership, understanding of volume/margin managed by channels, organization support for implementing strategies, identification of processes, lead distribution agreements, channel cost to serve, and timescales for complaint resolution. These all averaged above 50.

The worst seven performing areas were getting to know/health check, planning for customer acquisition, using benchmarks, segmented targeting, winback, acquiring customer information, and information planning. These all averaged below 25.