LG

- LG held its annual LG Awards ceremony to acknowledge and celebrate achievements in creating customer value through products, technologies, and service innovation over the past year.
 
- 74 teams received awards, nearly tripling the number of recipients since the program began in 2019.
 
- Among the outstanding winners, four teams were recognized with the prestigious 'Best LG Award,' including the LG Uplus ‘The Kids World’ team, recognized for fostering a vibrant customer engagement community and cultivating true fans, and LG Uplus consultants, who demonstrated exceptional dedication to customers with hearing impairments.
 
■ The awards ceremony celebrated 584 employees across three categories: Customer Contact, Market Leadership, and Foundational Process, with winners receiving the 'Best LG Award' (4 teams), 'Excellence Award' (35 teams), and 'Special Award' (35 teams). 
 
■ The scope and influence of the awards has expanded steadily, as evidenced by the growing number of winning teams each year, underscoring employees’ unwavering commitment to customer-centric innovation.
 
4 teams won the highest honor, the 'Best LG Award':
 □ Customer Contact category: The ‘The Kids World’ Team interacted with customers through the LG Uplus ‘Salon de moms’ community.
 □ Customer Contact category: Choi Yong-jae, a consultant, utilized a sign language video call website to communicate with deaf customers.
 □ Market Leadership category: The LG-Magna Team created customer value by applying innovative methods to the production of core components for electric vehicles.
 □ Foundational process category: LG Electronics H&A Company Team built a smart factory with world-class productivity, leveraging digital transformation technologies such as AI and big data, and earning recognition as a World Economic Forum Lighthouse Factory.
 
■ The new Special Award for Customer Impression Practice introduced last year was awarded to 20 teams for providing sincere customer service across diverse customer touch points, including offline stores or service centers.
 
■ In addition to the Best LG Award winners and special honorees, LG extended its appreciation to all 27 nominated teams with the presentation of the golden LG Customer Impression Badge.
 
■ Chairman Koo expressed his sincere appreciation and congratulations to the winners, saying, "Although they work in different locations and do different things, they have created valuable customer experiences by identifying and addressing customer needs from the customer's perspective. Anyone with a genuine commitment to customer satisfaction can become an LG Award winner."
 
 
LG held its annual LG Awards ceremony at LG Sciencepark in Magok, Seoul, on the afternoon of the 6th to acknowledge and celebrate achievements in creating customer value through product, technology, and service innovation over the past year. Under the leadership of CEO and Chairman Kwang Mo Koo, LG has been steadfast in its commitment to practicing customer value as its guiding management philosophy, refining it with each passing year.
 
The LG Awards, a prestigious group-wide innovation prize, was presented to 74 teams representing 584 employees this year for their outstanding contributions in creating exceptional customer value in three categories: Customer Contact, Market Leadership, and Foundational Processes.
 
There has been a notable increase in the number of recipients, with 24 more teams awarded than the previous year, which is a nearly 3-fold increase since the LG Awards began in 2019. Specifically, 27 teams were recognized in 2019, 44 teams in 2020, 50 teams in 2021, and 74 teams in 2022. This increase highlights the growing resonance of customer value management principles among employees, motivating them to create more impactful examples each year.
 
The LG Awards categories are designed to acknowledge customer experience innovation efforts across diverse roles within the organization, with no predetermined limit on the number of winners. Notably, a new category introduced last year, the 'Special Award for Customer Impression Practice,' recognizes frontline customer contact employees, such as those in after-sales service centers and call centers, for their dedication to fostering exceptional customer experiences.
 
This year's ceremony saw the number of teams honored with the ‘Customer Impression Practice Award’ substantially increase from 13 to 20, highlighting the growing emphasis on addressing even most minute customer inconveniences to ensure complete customer satisfaction.
 
Four Teams Honored with the Best LG Award Across Three Categories
 
In the Customer Contact category, the LG Uplus ‘The Kids World’ team won the Best LG Award for their management of an online community called ‘LG Uplus Salon de Moms’. Launched in March last year, the community serves users of LG Uplus' baby and toddler learning platform ‘The Kids World’ and provides an engaging space for interaction and support. 
 
By proactively engaging with customers and empowering them to participate as community managers, the team attracted more than 24,000 subscribers within a year of opening. This also led to tangible service improvements, such as offering subtitles for English content based on feedback from a customer who said, "I don't speak much English, so when I watch English content with my kindergartener, I often feel embarrassed when he asks me questions." 
 
"The 'I don't speak much English' post reflects the real voice of our customer, which we couldn't hear through traditional surveys or trial runs," said Won Kwang-dong, a member of the winning team. "I thought these awards were reserved for special people in certain organizations, so I was very surprised to hear that our team won the Best LG Award." 
  
Choi Yong-jae, a consultant at LG Uplus Marketing's Seoul 1 Center, also received the Best LG Award in the Customer Contact category for his exemplary dedication to customer service. Among his initiatives, he proactively sought out the Sign language interpretation center to help a hearing-impaired customer.
 
The Sign language interpretation center is a website operated by the Korea Intelligence and Information Society Promotion Agency, which provides a platform that facilitates telecommunication relay services for people with speech and hearing impairments. The interpreter translated the deaf customer's intentions in real time via video call, allowing Choi and the customer to communicate smoothly.
 
This story became known when the customer wrote on the LG Uplus website, "Please praise the consultant who helped me sign up for the internet by finding the Sign language interpretation center, which even I, a hearing impaired person, didn't know much about."
 
"Speaking with customers by phone is something that I took for granted, so when I couldn’t speak with this customer, it was hard at first," Choi recalled, adding, "I thought about it from the customer's point of view and gradually found a way out."
 
In the Market Leadership category, the LG-Magna team was recognized for their groundbreaking advancements in improving the performance of power modules for electric vehicle inverters using a proprietary method. 
 
The inverter plays a crucial role in transferring electrical energy from the vehicle's battery to the engine. However, this process typically generates significant heat. Unlike conventional components that dissipate heat from only one side, the innovative power module developed by the LG-Magna team effectively dissipates heat from both sides. This breakthrough significantly reduces the heat generated by the inverter, enabling LG Electronics to produce electric vehicle inverters with higher efficiency and lower cost, while maintaining high performance levels.
 
In the Foundational Process category, the LG Electronics H&A Company team was honored for leveraging cutting-edge technologies such as AI, data analytics, and robotics and building a smart factory to drive world-class productivity. The team built an intelligent process system at ‘LG Smart Park’ in Changwon, the company's main home appliance production facility. This advanced system integrates Digital Twin technology, AI, and big data, enabling managers to easily monitor various aspects of factory operations, including refrigerator production, parts movement, and inventory status at a glance. Additionally, the introduction of a 5G-based logistics robot that can transport loading boxes weighing up to 600kg has significantly boosted productivity at the smart factory, achieving an impressive increase of over 20 percent.
 
‘LG Smart Park’ was also selected as a Lighthouse Factory by the World Economic Forum (WEF) on the 30th of last month. A Lighthouse Factory is a factory that adopts advanced technology to lead the future of global manufacturing, and ‘LG Smart Park’ is the first to receive the recognition in the Korean home appliance industry.
 
Showcasing Innovative Customer Experience Enhancements Across Multiple Touchpoints
 
The LG Awards also spotlighted improvements in various customer experiences across diverse touchpoints. The new Special Award for Customer Impression Practice recognized 20 teams, including LG Electronics engineers who disassembled, cleaned, and repaired electronics in a fire-damaged house so that customers could purchase as few products as possible, LG Electronics care solution managers who filmed the product inspection process for absent customers with their consent, and LG Household & Health Care researchers who developed a spray detergent for easy dishwashing without using a scrub brush.
 
In addition to the winners of the Best LG Award and other special honorees, LG extended its appreciation to all 27 nominated teams with the presentation of the golden LG Customer Impression Badge.
 
Chairman Koo expressed his sincere appreciation and congratulations to the winners, saying, "Although they work in different locations and do different things, they have created valuable customer experiences by identifying and addressing customer needs from the customer's perspective. Anyone with a genuine commitment to customer satisfaction can win an LG Award."
 
Following safety protocols amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the ceremony was attended by Chairman Koo and more than 20 executives in person, including the winning team leaders, with more than 570 other winners participating virtually via video and open chat platforms.