Our Policy and Strategy
The TOMY Group conducts various activities that prize two-way communication with our customers. We have established our own detailed Privacy Policy and Customer Service Policy. We take all comments, opinions, and expectations voiced by our customers seriously and always strive to take a customer-oriented approaches. This two-way communication helps us further improve product safety and quality and refine our broader business activities.
TOMY Group Customer Service Policy
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Customer Interaction Principles
The TOMY Group Customer Service Department seeks to achieve our corporate mission to fulfill all dreams by valuing customer opinions, considering all issues from the customer’s perspective and standpoint, and reflecting customer opinions in the Group’s corporate activities.
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Customer Interaction Guidelines
- Listen attentively to customer requests and strive to respond accurately and swiftly.
- Ensure proposed content of any interaction is just and fair. Always remember to be kind and strive to make the customer feel safe and comfortable at all times.
- Strive to respond resolutely to unreasonable demands.
- Share customer opinions internally and use those opinions to improve the quality of our products and services.
- Adhere to all relevant laws and regulations and our own internal standards to ensure customer rights are protected.
*This policy will be going to be revised based on new TOMY group philosophies. (as of May 2024)
Management Structure
The TOMY Group Customer Service Department responds to customer inquiries by phone, letter, or email. All opinions offered by customers are recorded in a database as instructive, prized information and are shared on bulletin boards that employees can access. Customer opinions are also fed back to relevant business divisions and involved parties. Any content that is considered to have a considerable impact on customer satisfaction or that relates to product safety and quality is shared with important committees or boards of TOMY, T-ARTS, TOMY TEC, TOMY IBIS and other Group companies to expediate a swift response and ensure that specific quality improvements and other appropriate measures are taken. In the event of an accident, we cooperate with TOMY’s Safety & Quality Assurance Group and set up a Risk Management Task Force under the direct supervision of our representative director and president in order to ensure a prompt and appropriate response, minimize damage, and take measures to prevent a recurrence.
We strive to aggregate customers’ data whenever possible in TOMY IBIS, which has PrivacyMark certification, to ensure any information is managed collectively and securely. TOMY IBIS implements a number of measures to maintain the certification and ensure a strong personal information management system, including establishing a dedicated management committee, holding regular progress meetings, conducting investigations, audits and inspections, and holding group study sessions. TOMY’s Internal Control & Audit Group also monitors TOMY IBIS’s personal information management systems whenever necessary.
Key Initiatives
Customer Services
The Customer Service Department receives various communications from customers, including comments, opinions, and expectations, thank you letters from children, and questions about products and how to repair them. We use these direct customer opinions to help implement pertinent revisions to the toy-making process, such as developing new products, improving services, or strengthening our distribution system. When we respond to customer queries, we pay special attention to safety aspects, such as whether there is a risk of injury with a toy, and to ensuring a toy does not impede a child’s creativeness in any way. We also leverage today’s diverse range of media to provide appropriate guidance to any customers we come across on social media who are experiencing a problem, such as encouraging them to get in touch with our Customer Service Department.
Important customer service-related information is conveyed via a dedicated website.
Spread Out Customer Queries over Christmas Season
The Customer Service Department receives large volumes of customer queries during the peak Christmas season and more customers are having to wait longer for a response. To alleviate this problem, we try to spread out queries by appealing to customers from late November onward on our website and Twitter account to test any toy purchases that are operated by batteries well before Christmas. This initiative has been praised by Santas (customers) and retailers all over Japan for reducing customer waiting times and improving the quality of response.
New Repair Service to Satisfy Customer Requests
The TOMY Group will repair items for a fee if it has parts in stock (see more(In Japanese)).
While we are sometimes not able to accept requests from customers to repair stuffed toys or sewn items, we are continuously considering how we might meet customer requests for such repairs.
For example, we have received many repair requests from long-time Healing Partner Dacky users, a product that is especially popular with elderly people. Keen to respond to customers who prize the Dacky product, T-ARTS and TOMY IBIS came up with a plan to set up a Dacky Clinic for outsourced repairs in 2019 so that we could respond to customer repair requests.
Protecting Personal Information
To ensure appropriate handling of personal information, the TOMY Group adheres to laws and regulations relating to personal information, and ensures all executives and staff are fully educated on our own Privacy Policy and other specific regulations and manuals. If the handling of personal information is to be outsourced, this will only be entrusted to outsourcing companies whose personal information management systems have been checked in advance and judged to be appropriate. We then sign a contract with the outsourcing company that fundamentally forbids any further subcontracting, and make them responsible for ensuring appropriate and strict handling to avoid any loss or leakage of personal information.
Ensuring Appropriate Management of Information
The TOMY Group has established its own Information Security Basic Rules to prevent the leakage or falsification of information and has taken measures to firmly protect all information assets, including personal information. We also conduct training sessions on information systems and information security for all employees and officers via e-learning and other systems.
