A precondition for providing the kind of value that will excite customers is to continuously determine their current level of satisfaction. For this reason, each of our manufacturing plants administers questionnaires for people purchasing its flagship products and conducts surveys using product testers. We also see how the Mitsubishi Electric Group's sales and services are evaluated through sales outlet satisfaction surveys on sales policies of manufacturers and its sales subsidiaries, as well as customer satisfaction surveys on manufacturer support at large home appliance retailers. In the latter survey of fiscal 2008 (in Japan), we were ranked second overall¹ and first in the air conditioner category for the sixth consecutive year². These results will be communicated throughout the Group and incorporated back into sales and development strategies.

From this year, we will work to further improve our overall customer satisfaction ratings by endeavoring to raise customer satisfaction in each area -- product, sales and service.

The Living Environment & Digital Media Equipment Group, which handles home appliance products, has established the Customer Response Center to respond to questions from individual customers about how to use our products, and the Service Center to handle product repairs. Both operate around the clock throughout the year. Each of our manufacturing works responds directly to inquiries that come in via our website in order to facilitate faster, more accurate responses.

In addition, the Technical Support Call Center deals with technical inquiries concerning after-service and other matters from our retailers 365 days a year.

Due to expanding product features, inquiries taken by these help desks are increasing every year. At our centers where we take questions by phone in particular, we are working to add staff members and conduct education and training in order to improve the response rate and overall level of customer satisfaction.

Information elicited from our customers and retailers is fed back to the quality assurance divisions at each of our manufacturing works.

In addition to product-related help and repairs, the Living Environment & Digital Media Equipment Group, which handles home appliance products, provides a wide range of information to individual customers and sales outlets, including helpful lifestyle-related information and information on how to use products safely.

For individual customers, for example, our website includes an informative site for homemakers called "Shufure." The site provides information on interesting products and reports from new product testers to some 220,000 registered members (as of March 2008), and has been quite well received. In addition, we provide lifestyle-related product information and a variety of services to around 150,000 registered participants (as of March 2008) in our product registration service, which is available to purchasers of Mitsubishi Electric products in Japan.

Also on our website we provide product-related information including technical and installation manuals for sales outlets.

In addition, we distribute to domestic affiliates that handle home appliances both guidelines on creating installation manuals to ensure the safety of installation work, and guidelines on creating user manuals to ensure that products are used safely, and make sure they are fully used.