The quality of the services we develop and provide is central to our goal of becoming No. 1 in customer satisfaction.

Improving Customer Satisfaction

• Conducting Customer Satisfaction Surveys

  NTT Communications regularly conducts customer satisfaction surveys and uses the feedback to improve projects and services.

  We audit our sales activities once annually to solicit customer opinions that we use companywide to improve satisfaction levels.

• Action! OCN Initiative Quickly Addresses Customer Needs

  

  Action! OCN website

  We implemented this initiative to directly solicit feedback from personal OCN customers so we can become a leading Internet services provider.

  For example, customers told us of delays in displaying our website. We set up a dedicated website to allow network performance checks. When a subscriber told us that an unscrupulous company put annoying comments on the person’s blog, we strengthened our system to block automatic postings.

  OCN receives more than 20,000 inquiry calls a day. We aim to improve customer satisfaction by quickly and compassionately processing each call.

  See the following Japanese-language website for details:http://www.ocn.ne.jp/cs/

• Framework for Addressing Customer Requests

  In February 2006, the OCN customer support desk for corporate subscribers extended daily service inquiry support by one hour, to 6:00 p.m. We also lengthened the operating hours of the hosting services desk. Corporate subscribers can receive emails on construction work and service outages.

  We will further improve our services by seeking feedback through our customer support desk and our annual OCN subscriber satisfaction survey.

• Boosting Satisfaction through 99.999% Service Availability

  We are enhancing OCN services to ensure a user-friendly Internet environment for all subscribers.

  We maintain Japan’s largest backbone to deliver quality network services. The availability of our personal OCN services was 99.999% as of March 2007. We will continue to monitor our systems to maintain line quality. We will continue to serve subscribers following disasters by drawing on our backup routes.

• Deploying New Technologies to Improve Customer Satisfaction

  Initiatives to enhance the contents and quality of our OCN services included launching unicast Reverse Path Forwarding in April 2006. This technique blocks transmissions from packets that come without verifiable IP addresses, greatly alleviating loads on subscribers’ Internet bandwidth and efficiently combating address forging to improve security.

  We will continue employing advanced technologies to boost service reliability and customer satisfaction.

• Offering Advanced Services to Enhance Reliability and Convenience

  

  OCN Theater menu screen

  

  DoTV service screen

  Our many services aim to improve customer satisfaction. Spam check options enable automatic interception of around 720 million dubious emails monthly. Security services include virus checking, safeguards against malicious websites, preventing spyware and unauthorized access, and personal information protection.

  We enhance convenience through our DoTV Internet television service and OCNIPv6, a next-generation service that allows consumers to remotely access information appliances and other equipment from outside the home. Another offering is the OCN Theater broadband video service, which offers access to 12,000 titles.

  We will develop and deliver even more advanced Internet services in the years ahead to please our customers.

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Assessments of Our Customer Satisfaction Initiatives

• OCN Service Center (Sendai) Becomes World’s First Internationally Certified ISP Support Center

  

  International certification under the Help Desk Institute’s Support Center Certification Program

  In January 2007, our OCN Service Center (Sendai) became the first such facility of an Internet Service Provider to be certified under the Help Desk Institute’s Support Center Certification Program. This is the institute’s newest standard. The center was also certified under the previous version in December 2004.

  The institute is an international association for the service and support industry, and certifies centers only after strictly assessing service quality and activities. Customer satisfaction carries a very high weighting in evaluations, so our ongoing commitment to customer feedback likely contributed greatly to the new certification.

  We intend to identify more ways of delivering high-quality customer services in our drive to be the world leader in customer satisfaction among Internet services providers.

• Receiving Highest Marks for International Data Communications Services in Customer Satisfaction Survey

  We received three Diamond Awards from Telemark Services, a British Research company, in a May 2007 report measuring customer satisfaction for international data communications services. The report was based on the results of interviews with 1,271 multinational companies in 2006. It evaluated the world’s leading carriers, including AT&T Inc. and British Telecommunications plc. We were the sole provider included in the report, outperforming rivals in three of eight categories and winning best-in-category awards for the achievements in customer experience.

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Responsibly Providing High-Quality Services

• Using Service Level Agreements

  These agreements formally guarantee certain levels of service to customers, requiring providers to credit customers if service quality is lower than agreed.

  We adopted an industry-leading six categories of service level agreement to maintain the high quality of our Arcstar IP-VPN service. These cover launch delays, breakdown recovery time, outage notification, transmission delays, line availability, and network availability.

  Service level agreements depend on the services offered and apply to our e-VLAN, some OCN, and some specialized services.