Customer Responsibility and Quality

We have created a specialized organization to increase the speed of decision-making and feature implementation and build stronger relationships of trust with customers in areas such as industrial and textile printing, where requests for customization from customers are frequent. The specialized organization works closely with the development, quality assurance, customer service, and business divisions to communicate directly with customers, which enables it to quickly respond to special media, provide optimal customization of workflows and software, and make functional improvements that increase equipment reliability. These customer-focused efforts and requests have resulted in increased print volumes for customers and the number of new installations.

One of the post-printing processes is banding, where a paper band is wrapped around printed materials. Traditionally, customers had to perform this task manually, resulting in a high workload, increased risk of human error, and challenges in inventory management. In response, many customers strongly requested automation of the banding process. Recognizing the customers’ strong desire to see automated banding implemented and demonstrated as soon as possible, Konica Minolta developed a hardware solution using an agile development approach. This hardware connects third-party banding machines with Konica Minolta’s commercial printers. Remarkably, within just one week of receiving the request, we showcased a concept machine with automated banding functionality at an exhibition—an achievement that led directly to product adoption.
By modularizing the desired functions based on customer feedback and achieving overall product functionality through the combination of these modules, we enabled small-scale investment and rapid delivery. To rapidly validate value for clearly defined customer needs, we applied agile development not only to software but also to hardware, responding with speed and flexibility. Through iterative expansions and customer collaboration, we were able to turn these concepts into commercial products.
In this way, Konica Minolta is promoting and deploying agile initiatives company-wide to swiftly deliver value to customers.

To accelerate the digital transformation (DX) of the printing industry, Konica Minolta launched an initiative called “Workflow DX.” This initiative involves deeply immersing ourselves in customers’ production environments to identify and address the remaining analog steps in digital printing workflows. Through co-creation with customers, we support the digitalization of their production processes. We work closely with customers to understand both the direction of business transformation set by management and the challenges faced on the production floor. Together, we identify digital solutions that bridge this gap and propose practical approaches. There are three key points in our proposals for digitalizing production processes: (1) Can manual operations, such as number of physical touches, be reduced, allowing operators to shift time from repetitive tasks to more creative work? (2) Can work progress be visualized and the effects of improvements be measured? (3) Is the investment feasible? To realize these goals, our ICT specialists analyze how best to combine the customer’s existing systems with Konica Minolta products, third-party solutions, and customized tools. Starting from co-creation, we aim to build a circular supply chain optimized for digital printing—enhancing the value of print, revitalizing the industry, and contributing to environmental impact reduction through supply chain reforms that include logistics.

In 2012, the Business Technologies Business created a Customer Relations (CR) Division and adopted Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) as a target indicator. It developed its own scientific approach, adding NPS® to the conventional customer satisfaction survey and deploying it globally. Today, the results are being utilized to improve product and service quality.
In FY2017, a transaction survey system was introduced to ascertain customer satisfaction at the points of contact with the Company, such as telephone inquiries and repair service, and to obtain NPS® for these points of contact. In FY2019, the system was expanded to more countries, and in FY2020, a service improvement process was started based on the system. This process will enable the needs and negative experiences of every customer to be ascertained in real time, in order to make rapid improvements. The Division is working to further improve NPS® by developing PDCA cycles to address overall issues brought to light by the NPS® surveys and individual customer issues identified by the transaction survey.

*Net Promoter Score®(NPS®): an indicator that measures the percentage of customers who recommend the Company and its products and services to others. Net Promoter Score® and NPS® are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

The NPS® survey program has been expanded globally by increasing the number of countries in which the PDCA cycle deployment program is implemented. As of April 2026, the program has been deployed in 28 countries across Japan, the United States, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.
NPS® survey results had continued to improve since the full-scale global rollout of the survey in FY2014, reaching 22 points in FY2020. Subsequently, however, customer satisfaction related to product delivery and toner shipments declined significantly, resulting in a drop in NPS®. Konica Minolta took these results seriously and addressed the issues by eliminating supply delays and implementing customer care programs.
As a result, NPS® improved to 20 points in FY2025.
Konica Minolta will continue to restore customers' trust by advancing its customer care programs and other measures.
The Company also measures customer satisfaction in its Healthcare and Industry businesses and leverages the results to improve product and service quality to satisfy customers.

Many customers running global businesses centrally control at their head offices the maintenance and management of IT systems, including MFPs used in offices around the world. When requesting support from a device manufacturer, there are times when the head office, as the single point of contact, and the office actually needing support are in different regions. Accordingly, device manufacturers must also establish a global structure to provide accurate and timely support.
This is why Konica Minolta has built a new system to provide globally uniform support. Support staff assigned to sales companies worldwide have been organized and the contact point for customers has been centralized at the Global Support Center (GSC). By using purpose-built IT tools, support requests received by the GSC are shared with personnel around the world, resulting in timely and appropriate support with the dispatch of local customer engineers to handle hardware issues and specialized staff members providing remote support to solve software issues. Further, the level of service is standardized by creating a globally shared database of inquiries and the results of responses.

Konica Minolta runs the CR Master Program, an education and certification program that systematizes its unique customer relations (CR) activities with the purpose of improving the skills of CR promotion personnel at sales companies worldwide. Sales companies participating in this program expressed a strong desire for an educational program geared toward all employees, not just CR promotion staff. In response, the Company introduced the "CR White Belt" in FY2017 — an e-learning program designed to show frontline members customer-centric mindsets and behavioral guidelines. Thanks to these initiatives, the understanding of CR has steadily spread and taken root across sales companies.
Furthermore, for CR promotion personnel, the Company launched Community Calls in FY2023 to share CR activity case studies from various countries and deploy them as initiatives that can be utilized in other regions. In 2025, the Company held workshops to drive region-specific strategies. After clarifying regional policies and key challenges, CR activities are now evolving into practical initiatives aligned with these regional strategies.

A screen from the e-learning material for the Customer Relations White Belt

The Business Technologies Business is determined to provide a consistently high level of service to customers everywhere in the world. To that end, it conducts various kinds of technical training on products for the Group's own customer engineers and also for external distribution partners.
In Product Service Training, trainees acquire the skills and knowledge essential for the installation, setup, maintenance, and repair of each product. The training includes two different learning methods: instructor-led training to boost practical skills and knowledge acquisition via e-learning.
Konica Minolta's own technical certification program, Outward, is designed to keep improving the technical skills of customer engineers. This program is organized into five certification levels starting with Associate and going up through Professional, Expert, and Master to Diploma. It enables the gradual upgrading of skills, from the acquisition of the basic knowledge needed to provide support for Konica Minolta's products to the mastery of high-level specialized skills.
By making these training programs available to more and more engineers worldwide, the Konica Minolta Group will continue to enhance customer satisfaction globally.

Konica Minolta iCare, the remote management service for MFPs provided by the Company’s Digital Workplace Business, ensures secure status sharing and aims to reduce downtime by preventing malfunctions and enabling quick responses when they occur. In addition to automatic fault reporting, it manages the status of parts and consumables, enabling automatic toner delivery and engineer visits for consumable replacement at the appropriate time. Over one million Konica Minolta iCare units are operating worldwide, and feedback on actual operating conditions is used to improve the accuracy of fault prediction daily. Konica Minolta iCare data incorporates a big data analysis environment, building analytical models based on repeated machine learning, time-series forecasting, and verification. It offers various analytical models, such as optimizing toner replacement based on predicting print volume for each customer and analyzing call center call history, supporting customers with advanced data mining.
Products provided by the Healthcare Business are used in healthcare settings where patient lives may depend on the equipment, so there is a need for especially rapid responses to product failures and problems. Konica Minolta has established a call center that operates around the clock, every day of the year, to resolve disruptions on the medical frontlines. The Company established key performance indicators (KPI) focusing on reduction of customer wait time on the phone, improvement of the call center's ability to resolve problems on its own, and improving customer satisfaction. It works to provide better services in all of these areas.
As part of that effort, the call center in Japan has been actively promoting the adoption of remote maintenance for the quick resolution of problems by remotely operating products at customers' locations through the Internet. This allows problems to be fixed remotely without having to send out customer engineers, while reducing downtime for products and services and shortening diagnostic interruptions in healthcare settings.
In FY2025, around 70% of the calls received by the call center were from customers using remote maintenance. As a result, downtime has been shortened by about 50,000 hours per year,^*1 representing an approximately twofold reduction in downtime compared to FY2010, and we have maintained this level since 2018.
In FY2017, Konica Minolta became the first company in the Japanese healthcare industry to obtain COPC certification,^*2 and it will continue to maintain and develop the quality of its call center by meeting the strict certification standards.

• *1Calculated based on Konica Minolta's indicators
• *2COPC certification: An international quality standard for call centers only provided to organizations with outstanding performance.

Remote Maintenance System

The staff of Konica Minolta's sales companies are in daily contact with customers. As part of the Company's effort to improve quality from the customer's perspective, sales company staff participate in sales company joint evaluations and take part in evaluating quality in the development stage. In addition, since FY2017, C-PIUZ* activities have been conducted to obtain the candid opinions of customers regarding quality. These activities allow staff from the quality assurance and development departments to visit customers together with sales company staff. Through this activity, employees gauge customer feedback and make use of this information to improve products and services.
Additionally, Konica Minolta uses design thinking to uncover the value that customers are truly seeking. In FY2018, it established processes and methods for hypothesis verification in the development stage, and to determine whether the value is actually recognized by the customer once the product is on the market. The results are applied to the development of products and services from customer perspectives.

*C-PIUZ: Customer-Problem In Using to Zero, a unique Konica Minolta initiative to reduce quality problems that occur when customers are using the product.

Design thinking is a process and mindset where challenges are defined based on empathy for the customer, ideas are generated from those challenges, and value is refined.
At Konica Minolta, the Design Center plays a central role in introducing "design thinking." In collaboration with business divisions, it develops valuable services from the customer’s perspective rather than a manufacturer perspective. The company engages in value creation while remaining close to customers' actual workplaces across a wide range of fields — including the printing, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors, as well as the office domain where working styles are diversifying. For example, for multi-functional peripherals (MFPs) deployed globally, concepts are generated under the philosophy of "designing the experience" by understanding user challenges and country/industry-specific working styles through interviews and workplace observations. Furthermore, by repeating prototyping and verification, the Company pursues "comfort" and translates it into tangible value.
In recent years, the Company has also focused on the customer experience after a service is introduced, engaging in cross-organizational improvement activities in cooperation with sales companies. This reinforces quality improvement from the perspective of long-term experiential value. Konica Minolta will continue to pursue the creation of value truly sought by customers across various business domains, contributing to the resolution of social challenges.

Activities and Tools That Incorporate Design Thinking