Improving the Service Quality of Our Seminars

At Mitsue-Links, we hold a number of seminars on various themes throughout the year. While our main objective is to promote our services and solutions, our seminars aren't sales-oriented - which is one of the reasons why they are so popular. Rather, our seminars are designed to be informative, with a focus on sharing the latest trends and know-how, in order to assist our clients in their business activities.

Our Seminar Secretariat takes care of everything from planning, participant registration, and organization on the day to post-seminar information sharing and the publication of seminar reports. As the person in charge, I also actively speak at seminars. Please take a look at our seminar archive to see topics that we've covered recently.

Until February last year we regularly held the events in our head office's Seminar Room, however, because of the spreading of the novel-coronavirus, since then we've held seminars in an online format using Zoom for delivery. As with our company information sessions for jobseekers, while there was initially much trial and error in implementation, we're now able to run extremely smooth seminars with a skeleton crew.

In accordance with our shift to holding seminars online, we've now started providing slides in a digital format. As we were conscious of the value of our seminar content to our business, to-date, we'd only given hard copies of slides to participants attending our offline seminars. However, we now share password-protected PDF versions of the seminar slides to participants who complete our post-event questionnaire.

While the novel-coronavirus pandemic was the trigger, the changing of our policy toward sharing slides made us realize that there's still further room for improvement in the service quality of our seminars, which are an important opportunity for communication with our clients. Incidentally, service quality is one of the "qualities" that we focus on, alongside technical quality and process quality, to realize our "Smart Communication Design Company" management philosophy.

Going forward, there are two ways in which we plan to improve the quality of our seminar services. Firstly, we will be holding hybrid seminars, using both our seminar room and Zoom. While maintaining online streaming as standard, for persons who have difficulty sat watching lengthy sessions via PC and wish to participate offline, after thoroughly implementing novel coronavirus infection control measures, we will allow a limited number of participants to attend our seminar room. This is something we want to implement for our longer seminars (90-120 minutes in duration).

Second, to permit retrospective viewing of seminars. This will allow participants to re-watch recorded seminar content. While a Zoom account will be required, for a certain period of time from the day of the event, participants will be able to freely re-watch the seminar recording at their own convenience.

The first seminar targeted for application of the above-mentioned measures is the Sustainable Web Design Seminar scheduled for May 12. The seminar is planned to have a duration of 90-minutes, so if you find watching a screen for this length of time difficult, please consider joining us in our seminar room. Of course, depending on the coronavirus situation, we may switch to an online only event, so please be forewarned.

At Mitsue-Links, we will continue to work on improving the quality of service provided at our seminars. Please feel free to join us, and we welcome your thoughts and feedback in our post-seminar survey. Thank you.