#20: Customer Service

Our recent trip to China has made me VERY aware of the next item on my list of things I will miss about Japan...FABULOUS customer service. I mean simply awesome! Yes, of course, there is the occasional establishment that makes me frustrated but our experience, as a whole, has shown us that Japan takes care of their customers. Let me give you an example, our friend told us this story about a year ago. He and his family had order McDonald's for take out. They got their food home and realized they didn't have their french fries. My friend called McDonald's and told them they had forgotten the fries. After numerous apologies on the phone a McDonald's employee then DROVE the fries to my friend's house! This is good customer service! Stories like this are not the exception but the rule.

I will greatly miss the customer service here. Another small example, when you leave a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) they will sometimes come outside to wave, bow, and see you off until you are out of site. When Jason took a trip with the school down to Kyushu there were several staff members of the hotel where they were staying lined up waiting outside to greet the buses as they pulled into the establishment. You are always greeted when you enter a store and always thanked when you leave a store....even if you didn't buy anything.

Also, when unexpected things happen such as a poopy diaper explosion on an airplane seconds before take-off they react with patience, kindness, and a desire to help in any way they can.

If you have to wait in line to give your order or check out at a register, you are apologized to for having to wait. And if you have to wait for a little longer than the norm (about 3-5 minutes) they apologize for the hard wait you had to endure...seriously, they say that....in Japanese, of course. Sometimes we get a waiter that bows to us before he takes our order (kinda like a greeting) and after he takes it before he walks away and this is at a cheap restaurant.

Requests from customers is expected unlike in the US when you feel like you almost have to apologize for asking the staff to help you with something.

We were talking to some people from the Netherlands when we were in Indonesia and they had lived in the states for a time and they said that the US had very good customer service and I thought to myself, "Have you ever been to Japan? Because if you had, you wouldn't be saying such things."