Second Year Realities - What are Three People in the Customer Care Doing with their Varied Experience?
[Notice] Effective October 1, 2023, LINE Fukuoka has changed its company name to LY Communications. Articles published on or before September 30, 2023 were written with our former company name.
Masuda
Our Customer Care Department works to improve our contact with customers through a variety of angles starting with inquiries regarding LINE services, as well as analyzing the voice of our customers to improve their experience, and operating help pages and chat bots.
We held an interview with some of our other members who are in their second year here and joined midway through their careers that have the closest relationship with our users to get a better understanding of their goals and how they go about their work. Despite their experience in different fields, they have some common thoughts regarding the customer care field, so we sat down for an interview about the reality of two years in the Customer Care Department.
Masuda:What led me to ultimately join the company was the thought that I wanted to work with the Department Head Mr. Shigenobu. When I spoke to him about my previous experience and my thoughts about customer satisfaction in my interview, he agreed, and the feeling that we could work together to pursue that satisfaction was a major deciding factor.
The ability to learn about LINE services, which are developed at a global level, and be involved in operations was also appealing. How about you two?
I was worried about the gap between policy and my thoughts like at my previous job, but when I talked with the Department Head and managers, they thought that regardless of the product, focusing on support will lead to sales. That leads to confidence in customer support, and I wanted to give it a shot.
Once I gained experience in the field at my previous job, I was transferred to the back office. After a few years, I started to want to return to a place where I could see my growth as an operator, and a previous supervisor that was working at LINE Fukuoka kindly asked me if I'd like an interview at the perfect time. At the time I was living in Osaka so I was unsure about taking the interview, but I wanted to challenge myself to see if my experience was useful, so I decided to join.
Iwakiri:It was basically as I expected, but I didn't think I'd have so much fun working after a year, so that was one difference. (Laughs) All of the members of the Customer Care Department have a great attitude towards their work, and the environment of constantly learning new things as services continue to change at LINE Fukuoka is stimulating and fun.
I don't have a long work history, so when I joined the company I was worried about whether I could do well as the ideal candidate they were looking for, but because of the supportive environment that allows for me to challenge myself, I'm highly motivated in my work. More than anything if the work I'm doing is in line with the aims of the department, the environment of being able to freely design my work within my discretion is a good fit for me.
However, by getting experience dealing with customers hands-on for a year, I understand the basic guidelines, and I can also understand the problems of our team members, so I think it ended up being better.
Iwakiri:The ability to "order things and explain them" that's required in email customer support was fostered through direct customer service experience at my previous position and my experience from the perspective as a customer are skills that I utilize. On the other hand, it's hard to put feelings or experience gained through direct support into words, so I learned that from scratch.
Not many companies develop services on a global scale and give you the opportunity to learn about world class customer care, so that's something unique you can learn at LINE Fukuoka, and I think it will be a strength for my career in the future.
Iwakiri:When I can utilize the customer perspective I picked up in customer service at my previous position, and improve our guidelines to remove the burden of inquiries from users I feel rewarded. I joined the company with no experience in the field, so I had a lot to learn including the necessary processes, rules, and perspectives. When I realize a new improvement that I hadn't noticed before, I really feel that what I've learned has stuck and it makes me happy.
I'm not sure if this is a worry or not, but recently I find myself thinking about the difficulty of communicating things a lot. By taking on work to create guidelines for our operators, the opportunities I have to think about things from a variety of perspectives such as "how can I make this easy to understand?" or "how can I communicate this and prevent misunderstanding?" has increased. I really feel the difficulty of putting my thoughts in words, or conveying my feelings through text to our other members, and of course our customers.
The worry that I have right now is how I can involve others into my work and make progress. In order to move toward the image that the Customer Care Department is aiming for, there are necessary tasks, and even if they aren't urgent, I want to have everyone understand their importance as we go about our work together. In order to do that, I need to organize advantages and disadvantages from a variety of angles, explain why we're doing something now and gain their understanding, and I worry about what options are good and bad to move towards a good direction as a department.
What I worry about is how to nurture reading comprehension and communication abilities. Customer care through email is a necessity, but it's not a skill you can build immediately. I'm exploring the best nurturing methods for how I can efficiently have our new employees acquire the skills.
Masuda:Lastly, what do you all think about the Customer Care Department's policies for 2021?
Our recent goal is to provide high quality customer service by creating and improving guidelines so that we can have the perspective of both parties. Next year, I want to create tools and internal structures so that we can provide an even smoother response to inquiries.
My recent goal is to structure my current work, and shape it in a way that anyone can operate. There's a lot we should be doing to move towards the ideal image of our department, so first of all I want to create structures to reduce work that's dependent on a single person and provide an allowance of time, and next year I want to visualize the value of "cultivation" and "product management" which are difficult to show numerical results for immediately.
Masuda
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