Learning from customers who kept their bills in a drawer

The first complaint I answered properly came from a retired schoolteacher in Matsumoto in 1998. Her cable television bill had risen by ¥840, and she had read the enclosed notice twice without finding the reason. The reason was there, in the fourth paragraph, behind a phrase about revised channel packages. I was a billing analyst at Shiokuma Cable Television, a year out of Minakaze University with a degree in economics, and my job was to confirm that invoices matched contracts. Her letter taught me that a correct invoice can still fail the person who receives it.

I spent the next seventeen years in telecommunications pricing. At Kanetsugu Netlink, a Tokyo broadband reseller, I worked on dial-up, ADSL and then fibre plans, first as an analyst and later as pricing manager. Each new speed tier made sense to the engineers and less sense to the families choosing between them. At Sorawatari Mobile, one of the early mobile virtual network operators, I became product manager and then senior product manager for data and family plans. We cut the line-up from twenty-three plans to seven, and I discovered how much revenue had rested on customers staying with plans they no longer understood. Finance colleagues were right to ask what that simplification would cost before agreeing to it, and I learnt to bring the answer with the proposal.

In July 2015 I returned to Nagano to join Kiriyasu Energy. The company had delivered LP gas to households in the prefecture since 1961 and wanted to sell electricity when household retail opened in April 2016. I led a launch team of seven. We registered as a retail electricity supplier, wrote tariffs, prepared the explanation documents customers must receive before signing and built a switching process with the incumbent utility's network division. Most of our first customers already knew our gas delivery staff by name. That trust was valuable, and I was conscious that a confusing electricity bill could damage it faster than any competitor.

From 2017 I ran household electricity products. Smart meters gave us half-hourly usage, and our first app displayed it in charts that younger customers liked and older customers ignored. I began visiting homes with customer-centre colleagues, usually in January, when heating made bills largest. Many customers over seventy kept paper bills in a drawer and compared each total with the same month a year earlier. They did not want a chart. They wanted to know whether this month was normal and, if not, why. We added a mid-month forecast by post or text message for anyone who asked, and January calls fell the following winter.

In 2019 the first rooftop solar owners in our area reached the end of their ten-year feed-in tariff contracts. Their export price was about to drop from the forty-yen range to single digits, and battery sellers were already at their doors. Our offer to those owners, which I describe among my cases, was the first time I asked a sales team to show customers a comparison in which our own product often lost.

I became chief product officer in April 2021, when the company brought gas, electricity, solar-and-battery services and the app into one product organisation. I lead fifty-two people, including researchers, designers, writers and eighteen app developers, with an annual budget of ¥2.1 billion. Prices are approved by the president with supply and trading; my responsibility is the structure customers see, the evidence behind it and its explanation. The following winters tested that division. Wholesale prices were high, government bill relief started and stopped in several phases, and the renewable energy surcharge changed each spring. Customers attributed every movement to us.

The work I value most is not elaborate. A two-band time-of-use tariff that most customers can recite. A power-saving reward that never asks an eighty-year-old to switch off her heater on a night of minus twelve degrees. A battery comparison that sometimes tells a customer to keep his money. Each decision cost something we could measure, and in each a capable colleague argued for another route. I have tried to record those disagreements fairly.

I now want to contribute to a board outside my own market. Japanese companies serving households are adding subscriptions, automated controls and decade-long contracts, and their boards will approve products whose consequences appear years later. I would bring the questions of someone who has read a great many customer letters. I have not served as a director, and I would expect to learn from a chair and colleagues who know a different business well.

Open to Board appointments · Advisory roles

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