Coupang, the country’s fastest-growing social commerce firm, is focusing on drafting customer satisfaction measures this year, with plans to have them take up 70 percent of its new services, said its chief executive.

As an initial step, the company plans on opening a new call center and a self-owned logistics center by this month, Kim Bom-suk recently told The Korea Herald.

“While we put an emphasis on completing our customer satisfaction scheme in 2012, we plan to unveil the measures step-by-step to be positioned top in the industry.”

The logistics center, the first operated by Coupang, will take full control of product delivery, and the new call center will work on establishing a higher response rate to customers’ requests.

A comprehensive customer satisfaction plan is essential for creating a competitive market, according to Kim.

Coupang was the first in the local industry to run a customer center at lunch time and on weekends as well as public holidays as part of its customer satisfaction improvement scheme. As a result, the firm’s membership figure topped 10 million last week.

The 34-year-old CEO, who is also a Harvard Business School graduate, said he is looking further into redesigning the employee education programs and evaluation charts as other parts of the customer satisfaction enhancement tools.

“I plan to add improvements to all the meeting points of customer experience and it’s my ultimate goal to transform the firm into what could be considered a symbol of trust, which has so far been unheard of in the industry.”

He also said he defines Coupang as a “discovery shopping platform,” rather than social commerce, especially because a greater number of customers visit the company’s website on a regular basis compared to those who look for attention-grabbing items through social networking sites.

“The company needs to sell its strongest feature of being a discovery platform while maintaining its stability and basis with the customers’ trust,” said Kim. “In a related effort, Coupang has already become a mobile destination since releasing our mobile application.”

Kim said Korea’s social commerce industry is still highly underestimated although it is the sixth-largest market in the world.

“We’re looking at growing twice as big by 2015,” said Kim. “There aren’t that many funds that keep a close watch on our market but what they don’t know is how competitive we are ... Only a year has passed, but the Korean social commerce industry has grown to be the biggest in Asia,” he said.

By Cho Ji-hyun (sharon@heraldcorp.com)