320: Over-Servicing Japanese Buyers

<p style="font-weight: 400;">A very common complaint from foreign bosses here in Japan is that their sales staff are over-servicing the Japanese buyer.  Sometimes they are left to wonder who their staff are really working for – their company or the client’s company.  I am sure there are many sales bosses based outside Japan thinking, “that is the type of problem I would like to have with my sales crew”.  When we travel out of Japan and we are exposed to service in Western countries, there is always such a negative contrast with Japan.  For the most part we are interacting with the service industry in airports, hotels, restaurants and shops.  We will have to draw on our memory of what the B2B service standards were like, before we got to Japan to recall what the proper comparison should be.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">American B2C service is the outlier, because it is so strongly driven by their tipping culture, which doesn’t really apply that much in the rest of the world, where service industry staff are properly remunerated through their salaries.  Australia is a better comparison, because we have a similar non-tipping culture to Japan.  I was down there attending a funeral for my relative recently and staying at a city Hotel, when the valet parking young guy scratched my rental car.  Interestingly he didn’t make a bee line for me to immediately apologise.  In Japan that would be unthinkable.  He did eventually apologise, but the timing was too slow from my Japan trained point of view.  His manager took over and organised the insurance companies to get to work and he also eliminated the valet parking charges for my stay. That would be a basic response and if that had been Japan, there would no doubt have been additional things they would have done to compensate me for the inconvenience.  Here is the difference.  In the West we are trained to think in terms of minimums of service, but Japan is trained to think in terms of maximums.</p> <p style="font-weight: 400;">A big part of the over-servicing culture he