The Customer Support Center has been operating a call center and conducting customer surveys with the aim of collecting customer feedback and improving customer satisfaction. It has also been responsible for the secretariat work for the "ACT Plus 1" activities, which are being implemented as part of the company's efforts to improve customer satisfaction and improve operations.
Given the current increase in the number of new planning projects in each business area, the Customer Support Planning Group and the Customer Support Promotion Group were established in fiscal 2024, and full-time planning staff were appointed to further promote service planning.

At the call center, we have been able to significantly reduce the number of calls received at the call center over the past 10 years through comprehensive analysis of customer feedback based on previous inquiries and measures to resolve inconveniences and dissatisfaction. As a BCP response to the new coronavirus that emerged in 2020, a cloud call center system was introduced in 2022, enabling the Technical Support Center to respond to customer inquiries from home.
We conduct two types of customer surveys: a fixed-point survey (once a year) targeting important customers, and a live survey to check service quality after each maintenance operation. However, because the fixed-point survey achieved its target value in fiscal 2016 and there were major changes in customer needs due to the outbreak of the new coronavirus, we changed the questions in the fixed-point survey in fiscal 2020. With this change, in addition to the conventional customer evaluation of service quality, an element of understanding customer needs was added. In addition, in 2024, we have started to review the live survey.
The "ACT Plus 1" activities have been carried out with the participation of all employees on an ongoing basis to improve customer satisfaction and improve operations, but due to the shift to teleworking as a result of the work style reforms that began in fiscal 2018 and the new coronavirus, it has become difficult to carry out activities based on face-to-face meetings, so in fiscal 2021, the format of the activities was reviewed and some changes were made.
After that, we created a new concept and designed activities based on an external benchmark and a review of the results of our previous activities, and in FY2023 we ended the "ACT Plus 1" activities and in FY2024 we introduced a voluntary participation system and liberalized the timing of activities and members, and started the new CO-NECT activities.
We regularly participated in the QC Circle National Convention except for the period when it was suspended due to the new coronavirus, and we participated a total of 12 times from FY2014 to FY2023, and we won the Inspiration Award (average award rate of about 30%) decided by the votes of the audience 12 times.
In line with the relocation of the head office in 2020, the survey operations and CO-NECT activity secretariat operations were moved to the Toranomon head office, and the call center operations were moved to the Yotsuya Kokusai Building, which is the same building as the Tokyo branch.
The Perfect Score Engineer Award System has been in place since 2005 to recognize engineers who have received high scores in customer surveys, but due to differences in the number of engineers surveyed in each department and the saturation of engineer evaluations, a new Most Valuable Engineer (MVE) Award System has been established. The MVE and MVE-Rookie (for engineers with less than seven years of experience) for each year were selected based on more than a dozen internal indicators, including the number of customer opinions submitted, and votes from engineers in the same department, and the awards were started in 2022 based on the results of 2021.

The call center will begin considering the introduction of multiple channels for customer inquiries from fiscal 2025, and will consider transitioning to a contact center in line with the DX implementation of internal systems being carried out across the Hitachi High-Tech Group.
We will make major improvements to live surveys, and reflect on and improve the changes made to the fixed-point surveys conducted in 2020, with the aim of understanding customer evaluations from the perspective of CX (customer experience) and speeding up the development of measures for each department based on the results.
The CO-NECT activities aim to foster a culture that emphasizes the independence of employees, as well as improving customer satisfaction and business operations.

The call center, which began operations in December 2022, has enhanced BCP functions, including infection countermeasures and cloud computing.

At the QC Circle National Convention, we have won the "Impression Award", which is chosen by audience vote, a total of 12 times.