Best Customer Support of the Year 2024 by JIIT

MISUMI Group Inc. (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan; Representative Director and President: Ryusei Ono) is pleased to announce that it has been awarded the "Excellence Award" in the "Best Customer Support of the Year 2024" competition held by the Japan Institute of Information Technology (“JIIT”). This recognition is an acknowledgement of MISUMI’s commitment to improving customer satisfaction and achieving low-cost operations. 
MISUMI will continue to provide time value to our global customers in the IA (Industrial Automation) industry through expanding our services and contribute to enhancing their productivity.

The JIIT presents this award to companies, organizations, institutions, and individuals who have made contributions to the enhancement of corporate customer strategies and the advancement of customer support. The Excellence Award, which MISUMI received this year, is a recognition of those whose initiatives are particularly outstanding and have achieved notable results in corporate management.

Our customer support operations were experiencing rising costs that were negatively impacting customer satisfaction. This was due to factors such as the need to respond to business practices unique to the manufacturing industry, handle customer inquiries about the company's vast product line of over 30 million items, and acquire the necessary expertise. In response, we have implemented kaizen activities and promoted business automation using RPA and OCR to achieve both improved customer satisfaction and low-cost operations.
As a result of these initiatives, we achieved a 42% reduction in response time, a 20% improvement in customer satisfaction, and a 66% reduction in operating costs. Our unbiased analysis of the challenges and long-term approaches to various activities were recognized with the Excellence Award.

To achieve the goal of zero inquiries and reduce overall response time -
After gathering customer feedback, we identified a significant customer challenge: the difficulty in locating information on the e-commerce site. We conducted a thorough analysis of the issue to identify the root cause and have subsequently made improvements to facilitate more intuitive navigation. These changes include highlighting button links to encourage clicking, posting model number examples, and posting component dimensions. We are continuously making improvements with the goal of creating an e-commerce site where customers can solve their problems without having to send in an inquiry. To enhance our staff's product knowledge, we place actual products on display in the office, and we have also set up a specialist team to deal with advanced inquiries, in order to create a system that does not keep customers waiting.

- Reduce costs by automating operations -
There are several ways in which customers wish to place orders, including through a company-specific order receiving system (Web EDI), an e-commerce site, or a purchase order. We have integrated all of these order methods into our standard processes, and by leveraging RPA and AIOCR, we have reduced the manual workload associated with order fulfillment. In other words, we have standardized the complex company-specific order fulfillment processes and implemented low-cost operations.
In developing RPA, we have established a training program for employees in our customer service department. These employees are trained as RPA engineers, which not only improves operational efficiency but also enhances their skills and job satisfaction.

MISUMI sells mechanical components required on-site for factory automation, as well as tools, consumables, and other products to more than 318,000 companies (as of March 2024) worldwide. We wear two hats: a manufacturer with manufacturing functions and a distributor of other company’s branded products.
With this unique business model, supported by a solid business foundation, MISUMI achieves "globally reliable on-time delivery" for greater customer convenience.