In this article, I am going to share with you my real expenses. I live in Tokyo, I am taking the Water Bill and using their customer hotline service as a case example to explain to you the real confusing situation here.
Let’s dive in.
Background: The Tokyo Water Department is responsible to provide Tokyo’s households a clean water usage and to provide support through their hotline customer service team.
I live in a single flat and most of the residents here in the building are having the similar size of small flat. Since it is small and we do not have a washing machine facilitated in the room, we usually use the sharing laundry service downstairs.
I usually use the water for quick cooking and 15-20 minutes of body wash in the shower every day. In Winter of 2020, the bi-monthly bill that I received was 3,830 yen and here is the break-down copy of the bill. 3,460 yen was a fixed service charge by the water department, that means no matter if I had or hadn’t used water, this is the minimum pay. The balance of 370 yen was the actual amount of water consumption for the past two months. You see, the minimum charge was actually 8 times+ expensive than my actual water usage in total.
In fact, the 3,460 yen is a minimum charge of every household in Tokyo; no matter if you are a single family or you are a big family, the minimum charges are the same. I just knew it last time when I met a family in a friends’ gathering where we chit-chatted about the living cost in Tokyo. They are a family of four, a young couple with two kids and they just live near my flat. When they said they paid the same minimum charge of 3,460 yen to the Water department. Oh, Gosh! What a great shock to me! I can’t believe that the Tokyo Water Department has applied the same amount of minimum charge strategy to different sizes of families in Tokyo.
After my heart-broken sharing the above, now let me share with you my experience with their customer hotline service.
In Jan of 2021, I changed the bill settlement method from Cash to Autopay. But then, I found that there are more cash discounts that can be obtained if I settle by a new e-payment service, therefore, I want them to change back the initial registered payment method of cash for me. I called the customer hotline and requested them to do so. Normally this happens in Japan, most of the companies will just officially ask customers to fill out an application form for the request and wait for the change form to arrive; after the change application form arrives, then fill out the form completely and send it back to them for processing. This is the common way they do it. Wasn’t that Bureaucracy?
However, the Water Department seems to be different. They didn’t do the above bureaucracy thing, they performed very best in my case. Well, perhaps they knew their charges are high and expensive service charges should provide a quality service for a good balance. And, after my identity check, the customer service officer accepted my request and processed for me immediately.
In the process of my verbal request, I had nothing to do and nothing to follow up either afterwards. I felt that service was brilliant and I have come back to a modern city that day!
This article was first published on 5.6.2021
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