Our Approach & System

To ensure that all of our customers enjoy all aspects of their living spaces, LIXIL seeks to maximize customer satisfaction by considering it one of our material issues and viewing things from the perspectives of both end users and professional users, such as construction contractors.

To enhance customer satisfaction, it is essential to develop and provide products and services that meet our customers' needs as well as to communicate effectively and responsively. In Japan, we measure customer loyalty using the internationally trusted NPS®^* system. Our marketing function and business units work consistently together to improve our products and services based on the analysis of customer databases and customer feedback.

* NPS® (Net Promoter Score): A metric used to measure customer loyalty by asking respondents how likely they would be to recommend the company's products or services to close friends or family members on a scale of 0-10.

Initiatives to improve customer satisfaction (Japanese only, a new page will open) >

Improving Customer Lifetime Value

LIXIL aims to boost customer loyalty and maximize customer lifetime value^* by continuing to provide experiences that satisfy the latent needs of end users.

Our marketing function is pressing ahead with efforts to consolidate data from various customer databases in order to strengthen our customer-centric framework that focuses on customer feedback.

Our customer service centers and repair centers handle approximately 250,000 inquiries a month. Each center works closely with customers to gain an accurate understanding of the issue and shorten response time by swiftly escalating the issue to the relevant department. This helps improve customer satisfaction and customer service center productivity.

Furthermore, we use a customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage various data related to customer queries. The CRM system is linked to our e-commerce (EC) system, which manages online purchase history. We have created one central My LIXIL database of basic customer information, which we can then use to promote sales.

Building a Customer-Centric Framework

* Customer lifetime value: The amount of profit a company can expect to earn from a relationship with a customer from the first point of contact through the end of the relationship. For LIXIL, this refers to the continuous use of products and services across various stages from initial or additional construction to maintenance and renovation.

Consistently Improve Customer Loyalty Through NPS®

In Japan, we have started using the highly reliable NPS® system, which has been adopted by customer-oriented companies around the world and serves as a clear indicator for measuring the extent of a customer’s intention to continue using a particular product or service. We measure NPS® through surveys and then also use the accumulated survey response data to analyze customer experience.

Customers who contact our customer service centers to make an inquiry by mobile phone, those who request a repair, and visitors to our showrooms are asked to complete a survey.

The feedback we receive from customers through the survey is immediately accessible in dashboard form to facilitate quick action, and ultimately improve service quality and customer satisfaction. For example, to address concerns regarding repair costs, we've enhanced our online information by providing approximate costs for repairs, categorized by product and issue. The number of individual inquiries received has declined since these improvements were introduced.

Customer Inquiries

Employee Training: How to Improve Customer Satisfaction

LIXIL offers various regular and ongoing training programs to help employees learn how to interact closely with customers.

In Japan, introductory training sessions are conducted for departments related to customer satisfaction. Employees of the relevant departments acquire skills that enable them to view things from the same perspective as our customers through receiving explanations of new products directly from product development personnel and checking out the actual products and parts for themselves.

For call-center operators, we provide both group and individual training to help them better understand customers’ feelings. Additionally, we formulate and implement measures based on the results of our annual engagement survey to improve employee satisfaction and, by extension, customer satisfaction.

Employees who take door products training

Bathroom installation training

Having built an online learning platform and digitized our teaching materials, we have seen an increase in the number of participants and frequency of training sessions. We also received positive feedback from participants on training quality and effectiveness.

LIXIL Owners Club

In Japan, we have established a registration-based LIXIL Owners Club for end users that provides information and services to help ensure long-term comfort and safety of purchased products.

Customer satisfaction is certainly improving, with 98% of subscribers to our 5-year or 10-year long-term guarantee service saying they enjoy greater peace of mind and 93% declaring themselves satisfied. Customer feedback includes no longer having to worry about the need to repurchase products if they break, or feeling relieved because the guarantee service makes it easier to ask even for minor repairs. Furthermore, encouraging people to use our products consistently over a long period of time contributes to reducing environmental burden through waste reduction and promoting effective resource use.

The LIXIL Owners Club also serves as a platform for expanding our impact on society together with customers by, for example, providing the opportunity to participate in a donation or awareness-raising campaigns to help solve global sanitation issues. From FYE2021 to FYE2024, we conducted a donation campaign to Make a Splash! global partnership with UNICEF in which we donated JPY 10 for every customer who signed up for the LIXIL Owners Club. This resulted in a total donation of approximately 6.6 million JPY.

In addition, we strive to deepen the Owners Club members’ understanding of the SDGs through quizzes and our newsletter, and also raise awareness of our Make a Splash! partnership. The survey conducted before and after these activities every year indicated that these efforts resulted in a 6% increase in awareness and 15% increase in understanding of the Make a Splash! in FYE2024. We found that the NPS® of members who showed understanding of these activities was higher than that of other members.

The LIXIL Owners Club enables us to provide more intimate support to our customers and improve customer satisfaction. It also gives end users the opportunity to learn about and get involved in LIXIL activities designed to expand our impact on society at large, which, in turn, serves to further improve customer loyalty and promote our Impact Strategy.

Learn more about LIXIL Owners Club (Japanese only, a new page will open) >
Learn more about Make a Splash! >

Improving Customer Safety in Times of Disaster

In Japan, we provide online information on how to respond in the event of a natural disaster in light of the more frequent occurrence of disasters caused by climate change and other phenomena. We are also strengthening our customer support systems to enable us to respond to inquiries even during natural disasters, pandemics, and other emergency situations, and to respond swiftly to newly emerging needs.

The support we provided following the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake illustrates how we successfully leveraged the inherent strength of our membership system that connects directly with customers on a regular basis. We used this system to send prompt, pertinent information on free product inspections to LIXIL Owners Club members in areas covered by Japan’s Disaster Relief Act.

Key points for responding to specific disasters (Japanese only, a new page will open) >

When disaster strikes, we receive a higher number of emergency inquiries from affected customers. However, it is difficult for our call centers to respond if they have also suffered damage. In view of that, we moved our contact facility onto the cloud and increased the number of satellite sites. We have also created environments for operators to perform call center tasks from home.

By decentralizing our call center function and boosting the resilience of our infrastructure, we are making headway on establishing support systems that alleviate customer concerns in times of disaster, pandemics, or other emergencies.