This weekend was a fun one for us. Kuniko and I met Yoshi and his family for dinner at the cheese restaurant in Kobe on Saturday night and had a great time. Yoshi’s son Akira really got into the cheese menu. As an elementary school student he is pretty rare in Japan as he has no problem eating all kinds of cheese (even funky blue cheese) and he ate plenty of pizza, prociutto and an entire camembert fondue all by himself. We tried to do our part and ate and drank big. It was a fun night.<\/p>\n
Before meeting Yoshi’s family Kuniko and I did some shopping in Kobe and managed to obtain a sofa for the living room. We agreed on the shape and color right away, and the sofa passed the in-store comfort test – me lying across it like a drunken sailor. They’ll deliver it soon after we move in to the new place (whenever that is).<\/p>\n
Today I was at the bank sending money off to pay for the sofa, and I noticed for the first time the system that my bank uses to move customers smoothly through the process. I have lots of complaints about Japanese banks, but this particular strategy is especially clever.<\/p>\n
My bank’s tellers are usually lower level employees, probably getting paid near the minimum wage. They are polite, they are great at handling “normal” transactions, but if there is anything unusual they need support. The support is provided by one of two workers that walk around the lobby. These two are experienced pros who do a surprising amount of customer service while the customers are still walking to the service area. They get the right paperwork in the customer’s hands, steer them to the correct windows, and generally try to get as much of the workload off of the tellers as possible. <\/p>\n
I never would have thought of putting your most knowledgeable people on their feet in the lobby, but this works really well in Japan. With an older customer base, there are a lot of things they can do to speed up the process for some of the senior folks in there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This weekend was a fun one for us. Kuniko and I met Yoshi and his family for dinner at the cheese restaurant in Kobe on Saturday night and had a great time. Yoshi’s son Akira really got into the cheese menu. As an elementary school student he is pretty rare in Japan as he has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-p8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}