Why No Omotenashi From Some Chinese Retail Services In Tokyo?
This is a controversial piece today, because I am singling out one race, one group in isolation. It is also a total generalisation and there will be exceptions where what I am saying is absolute rubbish. There will be other races and groups, who are equally guilty as well, who I am not singling out or covering, so I am demonstrating a blatant and singular bias. I know all that, but let the hellfire rain down on my head, I am just sick of some of this lousy service here in Tokyo.
It is a mystery to me how the service in some Chinese restaurants here can be so oblivious to Japanese standards of omotenashi. Omotenashi is that sublime combination of anticipating and exceeding client’s expectations, that has made Japanese service so famous. I love Chinese cuisine and I enjoy the high quality standard of Chinese food in Japan. They have the best, most expensive quality, very safe ingredients and really great Chinese chefs here. When I go to places in Tokyo like Akasaka Shisen Hanten in Hirakawacho or Heichinro in Chinatown in Yokohama, the service is very, very good. My observation is that is probably the case because the serving staff are Japanese or Chinese who have grown up here.
Whenever I go to some “all Chinese” affairs, with only Chinese staff, I find the service is disappointing. I had this experience again recently in the Azabu Juban. It was a first and last time to go to this particular restaurant. The food taste wasn’t the issue, in fact some dishes were delicious. It was the total disinterest on the part of the serving staff and their manager. You don’t feel any particular need to go back there, when there are a hundred other restaurants within a five minute walk.
This makes no sense to me, because when I am Singapore, Hong Kong or Taiwan, the restaurant service is usually very good. Obviously, the more expensive the restaurant, the better the service of course. So there is nothing inherently missing in the service mentality and capability, that couldn’t be applied in Japan. Why then is it so lacking in omotenashi?
I remember reading a purported Chinese saying that, “A man who cannot smile, should not open a shop”. Obviously, some of the Chinese staff working in these establishments I am complaining about, have never heard of that piece of ancient Chinese wisdom. Smiling, making you feel welcome, treating you well are a big fat zero in my experience. The way of serving is very perfunctory, even rough, in some cases. Japanese style restaurant table service is generally very much more refined. What is driving this difference and what does it mean for the rest of us in the service business?
Perhaps some of the Chinese staff we are seeing serving in Japan are students. According to the media reports, many are actually working almost full time. They are not professionally trained service staff, in the sense that this is their career. Coming from certain parts of China and from different socio-economic backgrounds, they may have had no exposure to what good levels of service looks like.
I went to China for the first time in January 1976 and have been back a number of times over the years. I studied Chinese language, history and politics at Griffith University’s Modern Asian studies faculty. I like many aspects of Chinese culture and studied Tai Qi Quan for about ten years with my excellent teacher, Cordia Chu in Brisbane, before I moved back to Japan. I haven’t been back to China for a while, but I don’t recall the service being particularly bad when I was there last. Perhaps some of these local serving staff living here in Japan only ever eat Chinese food, so they are never exposed to how Japanese restaurants serve their clients. I find that hard to believe though.
The thing that puzzles me most is that despite the fact these Chinese staff are working in Japan and are floating in a deep ocean of omotenashi, some don’t seem to picking up any ideas on how to treat their clients. Why would that be? The managers are also Chinese, so they are responsible for leading their staff in the restaurants. Are they oblivious to the service market in Japan and how it functions? Are they just poor managers, who cannot place their operation in a broader context of local service standards. Are they inflexible and incapable of understanding the lifetime value of a repeater client?
This is a very competitive restaurant scene here, has more Michelin starred restaurants than Paris, so you would expect that everyone, including some of these Chinese run establishments, would be doing everything they can to build a loyal, repeater client base.
This challenges me to consider what we are doing in our own case, with our customer facing service. If I am going to bag some of the Chinese restaurant’s service here in Tokyo, then I had better consider our own standards at the same time.
We are a gaishikei or foreign run establishment here. I am not Japanese, but I am the boss. Am I operating the company service provision in terms of what I am used to in Australia, my home country? Am I doing an Australian version of what some of these Chinese restaurants are doing here in Tokyo in their service business? Are we in fact, providing enough omotenashi service to our own clients? Could we do better in this regard?
I find a lot of Japanese service very polite, but also rather impersonal and almost robotic sometimes. Compared to the poorer versions of some of these Chinese restaurant service offerings however, I will take the Japanese polite, impersonal, robotic option every time. How can we see our service businesses in a different light? How can we make sure we are not only providing omotenashi levels of service, but are going beyond that, to offer a more personalised experience? Maybe we need to audit what we are doing, to see if we are missing some vital areas for improvement.
I really like Elios Locanda Italian restaurant in Hanzomon, because I am treated like one of the family. This is the feeling transmitted through their Japanese staff. Elio himself, is not always there, all the time, but that authentic Italian family style service is there. He is setting the service standard and the Japanese staff are following it. I see this example and I think to myself, “it is possible to have a more personal level of service here, transmitted through your Japanese staff”. My family and I have been regulars at Elios since we returned to Tokyo from Osaka in 2001. Talk about the repeater, life time value of the customer. They have seen my son grow from a baby, to a young man in that time. We are part of the family and this is the key - we were made to feel like that from Day One.
How about your service provision standards? Are you making your clients feel like part of the family? What is your repeater rate? How many people continue to buy from you, year after year? Are you tracking this? Do you know what the average buying continuity rate is with your customers? When we see bad service, it is always a good reminder to make sure that what we are doing ourselves is at the required omotenashi level.
If you are not sure what I am talking about with this omotenashi thing, here is my recommendation. Go to a very upscale Japanese kaiseki restaurant preferably in Kyoto or a Toraiya traditional sweets coffee shop and remind yourself what excellent service looks like. Then reflect on what you are offering in service terms. Break down your every touch point with your customers and clients and see if there isn't a lot more omotenashi that can be introduced in each case. We can always learn from our own mistakes and from the mistakes of others when it comes to providing better service. The point is to observe carefully, change quickly and commit to massive improvement.
Why We Mess Up Customer Service
Poor customer service really irritates us. When we bump into it, we feel betrayed by the fIrm. We have paid our money over and we expect excellent customer service to come with the good or service attached to it. We don’t see the processes as separate. In this Age of Distraction, people’s time has become compressed. They are on the internet through their hand held devices pretty much permanently. We all seem to have less time thaN before so we become cross if things from the internet don’t load or load too slowly. If we have to wait we don’t like it, regardless of what the circumstance. We are perpetually impatient. Here is a deadly breeding ground for customer dissatisfaction.
There are five elements usually driving customer unhappiness with us.
We need processes to run our organisations on a daily basis. This includes how we communicate and align the features and value of the offering with the customer’s expectations. In constant drives for great efficiencies, we tend to mould the processes to suit the organisation’s needs, in prefer to the customers. Japan is a classic in having staff run the business based on what is in the manual. If a decision requires any flexibility, this is usually dismissed because the staff only do what the manual says. As the customer, we often want things at the odds with the manual or we want something that diverges from what the manual says.
Take a look at your own procedures. Are there areas where you can allow the staff to exercise their own judgment? Can you empower them to solve the customer’s problem, regardless of what is in the manual. Our processes often become covered in barnacles over the years and from tine to time we need to scrape them off and re-examine why we insist things can only be done in this way.
Who does what in the organisation. This includes agreement on tasks and responsibilities and holding people accountable to these. Japanese staff, in my experience, want their accountabilities very precisely specified and preferably to be made as tiny as possible. They are scared of making a mistake and being held accountable if things go wrong. They have learnt that the best way of doing that is to become as small a target as possible.
The usual role split works well, but what happens when people leave, are off sick or away on holiday? This is when things go awry. Covering absent colleagues requires flexibility and this is not a well developed muscle in Japan. What usually happens is everything is held in abeyance until the responsible person turns up again. Customers don’t respect those timelines and they imagine that everyone working for the firm is responsible for the service rather than only the absent colleague. We need a strong culture of we pick up the fallen sword and go to battle to help our customer, if we are the only person around. This is particularly the case with temp staff. They are often answering phone calls or dealing with drop in visitors and they need to be trained on being flexible and fixing the customer issue.
How customer service personnel get along with each other and other departments is key. This includes such things as attitude, teamwork and loyalty. Sales overselling and over promising customers drives the back office team crazy. They have to fulfil the order and it is usually in a time frame that puts tons of pressure on the team. This is how we get the break down of trust and animosity reigning inside the machine. This leads to a lack of communication and delivery sequences can get derailed. When colleagues are angry, they tend not to answer the customer’s phone call as sweetly as we might hope. We need to be careful to balance out these contradictions and have protocols in place where we can minimise the damage. What are your protocols and does everyone know and adhere to them. Now would be a good time to check up on that situation.
How the organisation defines and communicates the overall and departmental vision, mission and values is key. This is the glue. We need this when things are not going according to plan. When we grant people the freedom to uphold all of these highfalutin words in the vision statement with their independent actions, then we introduce the needed flexibility to satisfy clients. Are your people able to take these guiding statements issued from on high and then turn them into solutions for clients?
The resources available to the customer service departments such as time and money become critical to solving customer issues. How much control do we give to the people on the front line to solve problems for our customers? Often we weight them down with rules, regulations and procedures, which make them inflexible. Check how much freedom you have granted to your team to fix a problem for a client? You may find that during the last recession you wound that whole process in very tight and forgot to loosen it off, after times got better.
We need to get under the waterline and check for a build up of barnacles impeding our customer service provision. Scrape them off wherever you find them and have a steady routine to always take a look and see what has built up over time. Invariably you will find something that can be removed or streamlined, that the customer will appreciate. Remember, if you can do this and your rivals can’t or don’t, that is a big advantage in the customer satisfaction stakes.
Typical Japanese Salespeople’s Objection Handling Issues
Getting pushback, rejection, disinterest when you present your solution to the client’s problems is the natural state of things. Getting a sale is an exception. That is why the best salespeople are exceptional. There are so many ways to fail in sales, it is no wonder that getting to a ‘”yes” answer is so hard. One of the common questions or issues we get in our sales training classes from Japanese salespeople, are about how to handle the client’s objections. There are some key techniques we need to be applying at this point in the sales conversation.
Obviously, we should always question the objection. The words we hear are an abbreviation, a headline for a much longer reason or more elaborate reason for them not to proceed with us. We want to hear the full thinking behind their rejection of our offer. We also know that we shouldn’t get busy answering the first objection they share. This may not be the real objection. Always have the tip of an iceberg picture in your mind’s eye and imagine there is a big chunk of reasoning as to why it is a “no”, hidden below the surface.
We need to keep pushing for other reasons not to go ahead, after they have told us each one, until we have exhausted their supply. We then ask them to rank them in order with the highest priority first. That is the one we attempt to answer. When we get to this point we have to make a couple of judgement calls. Is this a real objection? Is it a legitimate reason? If it isn’t, then we have not uncovered the real culprit yet, as to why they can’t proceed with us. We need to keep digging for their actual issue with our proposal.
If it is a legitimate reason not to proceed, we need to move on to the second judgement. Can we actually supply what they want, at the price and in the way they want it? Can we overcome the objection within our resources and within the bounds of our pricing and profit model.
Some clients love to play a game called “sport negotiating”. They have a big ego and want to see how hard they can push us on price. This isn’t as much about the economics of the deal, as about their need to win. We may conclude we don’t want to play that game and walk away. That is always my preference when I meet these types of buyers. You can usually tell from their attitude what they are doing. I would rather find a client who will become a repeat buyer and with whom I can cement a long term, rather than transactional relationship with a bully.
If you conclude that you can deal with their price issue, then it is a matter of judgment on how low you need to drop your price. In Japan, once you drop it, then that becomes the ceiling and they want to push you even lower. Never go in with your best price, unless you want to get massacred. Always have some margin in there, so that if you are forced the drop the price, then you can still make the deal worthwhile from your own financial point of view.
Another common objection is that they are satisfied with their current supplier and don’t want to change. This objection is much harder to deal with than price.
The risk averse nature of business here drives everyone to find someone they can trust and then to keep using them. It makes sense in a society which doesn’t tolerate errors or failure. You may disagree with that philosophy, but nobody cares what you think.
There must be some clear differentiation to what you are offering, compared to what the incumbent provides. This may be speed, quality, reliability or cost. Proving this through salesperson hot air and bluster is impossible. You need to ask for a trial or a test or a period of engagement to demonstrate why you are the superior choice. Japanese companies are always very focused on what their competitors are doing. This means that the idea that what you have is really good and will certainly be going to their competitor, to make them an even more formidable rival, if they don’t buy from you now, will get people’s attention.
When we talk about a test or trial, expect it will be an elongated affair. No one gets rewarded in Japan for making a quick decision, but plenty of people are made to suffer if they make a wrong decision. They will want to test and observe, test and observe at their leisure, rather than addressing your preferred timing. I would rather take part in a long test maturation process with the client, than get locked into some disadvantageous pricing.
We recently had that case with a global automotive company. Their foreign headquarters decided that our Japan pricing didn’t fit into their global model and we should reduce it. This particular class they wanted to do, always has a long waiting list. This is at the current pricing and there is a limit on how many can take part in each class. I had no hesitation in telling them we couldn’t match their expectations.
I tried to educate them on different cost frameworks, country by country. I asked them if they were willing to reduce their Japan HR team’s personal salaries, to match those in equivalent jobs in the foreign headquarters? Their answer was no they would be able to do that. Of course not, so why expect me to match that foreign regimen with my Japan pricing? Sometimes we are dealing with uninformed, parochial idiots.
I would rather forego the business, than comply with an uninformed opinion about our relative cost, against our quality. If you believe in what you are selling, then you should be brave in the face of objections. Remember, in 99% of cases there are usually plenty of buyers in an industry. There will be other buyers who will appreciate your quality at that cost. Let’s all go find those companies.
Generating Your Own Leads In Sales
Marketing plays a key role in generating leads. They are trying to maximise the accuracy of the segmentation of the data base, to make offers that resonate specifically with different segments. They are producing content marketing pieces that will spark leads through the SEO route. Buying ad words to get pay per click activation from buyers, searching for your specific good or service is another channel. Potential buyers raise their hand when they download a white paper or an eBook from the website or leave an inquiry. However this is never enough from a sales point of view.
Salespeople want to fill the top of their funnel of leads. They know they have certain ratios which will unveil the KAIs or Key Activity Indicators. If we try to email or phone a certain number of prospects, then we will get a certain amount of replies or contacts. By tracking how many we make contact with we can get a ratio of our activity relative to our success. The next stage is converting those contacts into face to face meetings. In Japan, for the vast majority of B2B sales, this is required, especially if you are a potential new supplier. There will be a ratio of success here counting appointments achieved against attempts to get a meeting. Then obviously we can count how many of those meeting led to a deal being done. That is another key ration.
We can calculate the value of all the deals we did against the number of deals and work out our average sale value. If our average deal size is 1 million yen and our annual sales target is 30 million yen then we can work backwards and nominate how many original contact we need to be making to generate our target number. The problem is very few sales people have any clue what their KAI is and they just ramble thorough the year.
When we know our KAI we know we need to put aside what marketing is doing because we can’t control that process. We can control though, how many networking events we go to, how many cold calls we make, how many reactivation calls to orphan clients we need to make. We have a clear idea of what an ideal client looks like.
We have clients in an industry who have rivals in the same business. The chances are high that the problems and issues facing one five star hotel in Tokyo will probably be shared with other similar hotels. Our insights derived from dealing with one can provide us with a battering ram to break into the other hotels.
Commonly, cold calls fall on stony ground in Japan unless you know the exact name of the person you need to talk to. The lowest placed young woman on the totem pole is always designated to pick up the phone. Despite her tender years she has become a hardened, ego demolishing, expert at keeping her bosses protected against pesky salespeople. “Who are you”, “Why are you calling, “We will call you back”, then crickets is usually how it goes.
Most salespeople just ask to speak with the sales manager, false promises are made to get rid of them and deafening silence on the return call front is all they ever experience. The Sales Manager never contacts you and you are never ever confident that young Ms. Call Killer even passed your message on to the boss in the first place.
Based on our insights gained from working with similar companies in the same industry, we can try a different angle. “Hello, this is Greg Story from Dale Carnegie Training Japan, we are global soft skills training experts. We have been working with your direct competitors here in Japan. What you will find interesting is we have been having great success helping their sales teams to win new business for their Hotels. These rival sales managers have loved seeing their teams going after new business, succeeding and so substantially expanding their sales. Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure. Please allow me to discuss this possibility with your sales manager, to see if we can help you achieve similar success. Would you please transfer me to the sales manager?”.
Invariably the Sales Manager “isn’t there”, even if they actually are there. At this point Ms. Call Killer often goes stone motherless silent. She will not offer to take a message, as she is hoping you will crack and say “I will call back later”. That makes her feel good about getting rid of you, because experience has taught her that most salespeople don’t try again. She will not tell you the name of the sales manager if you ask. If you don’t give up so easily and you ask to leave a message, she will take down your name and number - maybe. You have to rely on her tender mercies for your message to be passed across. Here is a key tactic. You should keep calling back every few hours, until you get to talk to the sales manager. You have to be that persistent to break through the wall.
Making these cold calls needs discipline, guts, a thick hide and time. Everyday you need to make a key appointment. That is the one with yourself, to hive off time to get on the phone and hit these walls. Think about it. You will always defend the time to meet with a client and you have to apply the same rigour to the time you need to make these calls. Get it into your schedule and BLOCK that time out.
This is one way we can take control of our own destiny and make our own leads. It is tough, but persistence and conviction that what you have is what they need and the time to do it, are the prerequisites. Block out the time and get on the phone. Take command.