Report
Reports about meetings at AJG
Prof. Dr. Atsushi Taira chaired the SIEM research group meeting at the autumn AJG 2011 conference in at Oita University. Prof. Dr. Rolf D. Schlunze reported about the workshop at Humboldt University Berlin and announced the forthcoming publication of the 2010 SIEM conference book. Thanks to our guest speaker, Professor Yasuhisa Abe, we learnt much about Japanese management in China.
Prof. Yasuhisa ABE (Kyushu University, Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies) Why Have Customer Service Centers serving Japan in Foreign Cities Relocated to Japan? - The Case Study of CCs in Dalian City, China.
Since the late 1990s, ICT and service businesses in Japan have relocated business functions to newly emerging nations where costs are lower due to the acceptable improvement of communication technologies and infrastructure. The purpose of this research is to gain understanding of customer service centers (CC) set up in Dalian city serving Japan and how those companies adapt themselves to the change of locational environment. We picked the city of Dalian in China, known as the most popular location for Japanese companies, as the research area.
Since Software Park was built and local infrastructure was improved in 1998, CCs serving Japan have been built in Dalian city, especially between 2000 and 2006. During this period, many CCs were also built in provincial cities in Japan. The reasons for relocation were cheaper labor, land and communication costs, compared to Japan. In addition, there was a pool of educated Japanese speakers in Dalian. There are 14 universities in Dalian that encourage education in Japanese, and many students have experience in studying at university in Japan. In sum, Dalian became the most popular foreign city for Japanese CCs.
CC service is for end users, and it requires 1. native level Japanese skills, 2.high customer service skills, 3.deep knowledge of products and service. As a result of the demanding quality required, in fact, the number of companies that have located to Dalian is not as great as broadcast by the media. Most of such companies were global companies with headquarters in the U.S.A or China. There were a limited number of Japanese companies, mainly B.P.O. (Business Process Outsourcing) venders among the whole group of companies. In addition, since 2007, prices and labor costs have risen in China and the increased number of companies has led to competition in the limited human resources market. Although Dalian has enough human resources skilled in Japanese, companies are facing difficulty in acquiring operators skilled enough to meet other requirements. It is said that only 20-30% of those who have studied at Japanese universities are capable to work as CC operators.
Therefore, some CCs relocated or set up additional capacity in provincial cities in Japan. However, most of these companies left their Dalian locations for other reasons. They changed their off-shore operations from CC services, which require high Japanese skills, to back-office services including data entry and commissioned software development for Japanese market. Some companies changed these CCs serving Japan into CCs or business offices serving China. These off-shoring activities have become more and more common in recent years.
It can be said that the reasons for relocation of CCs from Dalian to provincial cities in Japan are not only due to rising prices and wage levels in Dalian but also to factors such as the requirement for high Japanese skills and Japanese style customer services.