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Creating Customer Value through Design Thinking

Developing Quality Improvement Activities from the Customer's Perspective

The staff of Konica Minolta's sales companies are in daily contact with customers. As part of the company's effort to improve quality from the customer's perspective, sales company staff participate in sales company joint evaluations and take part in evaluating quality in the development stage. In addition, since fiscal 2017, C-PIUZ^* activities have been conducted to obtain the candid opinions of customers regarding quality. These activities allow staff from the quality assurance and development departments to visit customers together with sales company staff. Through this activity, employees gauge customer feedback and make use of this information to improve products and services.
Additionally, Konica Minolta uses design thinking to uncover the value that customers are truly seeking. In fiscal 2018, it established processes and methods for hypothesis verification in the development stage, and to determine whether the value is actually recognized by the customer once the product is on the market. The results are applied to the development of products and services from customer perspectives.

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C-PIUZ: Customer-Problem In Using to Zero, a unique Konica Minolta initiative to reduce quality problems that occur when customers are using the product.

Promoting Service Development Using Design Thinking

Led by the Design Center, and with cooperation from the business divisions, Konica Minolta is introducing design thinking and developing value-added services based on a customer perspective, rather than a manufacturer's perspective.
Design thinking is the process and mindset of defining issues based on empathy for the customer, generating ideas based on issues, and refining value.

Through the incorporation of design thinking, Konica Minolta is developing service from the customer's perspective in a wide range of business areas such as printing, healthcare and factory equipment maintenance. For example, the company's factory equipment maintenance service involves visiting the customer site and meeting with various stakeholders, and accompanying staff on actual equipment inspection patrols. This enables Konica Minolta representatives to experience the customer's workflow for themselves. After identifying potential issues at the site, the representatives perform a process of iterative hypothesis-making and verification. The customer is then presented with an easy-to-understand proposal for the safe equipment maintenance they need, with a focus on the experience they can expect. A new solution can also be created with the customer, one, for instance, that makes gas and heat usage easy to monitor, which may then lead to maintenance service development. Konica Minolta will continue to pursue the creation of value that customers are truly seeking, in various business areas. It will also produce innovation that contributes to the identification and solution of challenges for society and local environments.

■Activities and Tools that Incorporate Design Thinking

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Support Systems

System Built to Provide Globally Uniform Support

Many customers running global businesses centrally control at their head offices the maintenance and management of IT systems, including MFPs used in offices around the world. When requesting support from a device manufacturer, there are times when the head office, as the single point of contact, and the office actually needing support are in different regions. Accordingly, device manufacturers must also establish a global structure to provide accurate and timely support.
This is why Konica Minolta has built a new system to provide globally uniform support. Support staff assigned to sales companies worldwide have been organized and the contact point for customers has been centralized at the Global Support Center (GSC). By using purpose-built IT tools, support requests received by the GSC are shared with personnel around the world, resulting in timely and appropriate support with the dispatch of local customer engineers to handle hardware issues and specialized staff members providing remote support to solve software issues. Further, the level of service is homogenized by creating a globally shared database of inquiries and the results of responses.

CR Master's Program: A Program for Developing Personnel with Strong Customer Relations Skills

The Customer Relations Department of Konica Minolta's Business Technologies Business has established a CR Master's Program, an education and certification program that systematizes the company's unique customer relations activities with the purpose of improving the skills of personnel who promote customer relations at sales companies around the world.
Later, the sales companies that participate in this program requested that a training program be made available to all employees, not just customer relations members. Konica Minolta met these requests in fiscal 2017 by establishing Customer Relations White Belt, an e-learning program that provides an overview of the customer-centric approach and action guidelines for front-line members.
Clear and succinct training materials were prepared in both English and Japanese, and shared with all sales companies. They were well received by those companies, which have already started using them for training. Translations will be needed for several sales companies where the local language is not English or Japanese, but these materials have already received high praise from sales companies that have begun the training.
In fiscal 2020, Konica Minolta opened a community site for CR promoters, aiming to improve the quality of CR activities globally by sharing examples of CR activities in each country.

A screen from the e-learning material for the Customer Relations White Belt

Implementation of Training, Including for External Partners, to Raise Support Quality

The Business Technologies Business is determined to provide a consistently high level of service to customers everywhere in the world. To that end, it conducts various kinds of technical training on products for the Group's own customer engineers and also for external distribution partners.
In Product Service Training, trainees acquire the skills and knowledge essential for the installation, setup, maintenance, and repair of each products. The training includes two different learning methods: instructor-led training to boost practical skills and knowledge acquisition via e-learning.
Konica Minolta's own technical license certification program, Outward, is designed to keep improving the technical skills of customer engineers. This program is organized into five certification levels starting with Associate and going up through Professional, Expert, and Master to Diploma. It enables the gradual upgrading of skills, from the acquisition of the basic knowledge needed to provide support for Konica Minolta's products to the mastery of high-level specialized skills.
By making these training programs available to more and more engineers worldwide, the Konica Minolta Group will continue to fulfill customer satisfaction globally.

Promoting the Adoption of Remote Maintenance

Products provided by the Healthcare Business are used in life-threatening medical settings, so there is a need for especially rapid responses to product failures and problems. Konica Minolta has established a call center that is operating around the clock, every day of the year, to eliminate interruptions on the medical frontlines. The company established key performance indicators (KPI) focusing on reduction of customer wait time on the phone, improvement of the call center's ability to resolve problems on its own, and improving customer satisfaction. It works to provide better services in all of these areas.
As part of that effort, the call center in Japan has been actively promoting the adoption of remote maintenance for the quick resolution of problems by remotely operating products at customers' locations through the Internet. This allows problems to be fixed remotely without having to send out customer engineers, while reducing downtime for products and services and shortening diagnostic interruptions in healthcare settings.
In fiscal 2023, around 70% of the calls received by the call center were from customers using remote maintenance. As a result, downtime has been shortened by about 50,000 hours per year,^*1 representing an approximately twofold reduction in downtime compared to fiscal 2010, and we have maintained this level since 2018. The use of remote maintenance has also cut down on driving by engineers, thereby lowering gasoline consumption and CO₂ emissions.
In fiscal 2017, Konica Minolta became the first company in the Japanese healthcare industry to obtain COPC certification,^*2 and it will continue to maintain and develop the quality of its call center by meeting the strict certification standards.

*1

Calculated based on Konica Minolta's indicators

*2

COPC certification: An international quality standard for call centers only provided to organizations with outstanding performance.

Introduction of Online Sales

To improve customer convenience, Konica Minolta has introduced online sales in its Business Technologies Business (Japan).