10x Growth in Product Page Traffic: How 2nd Street Connected Customer Support to Sales

GEO Holdings Co., Ltd. (2nd Street)

Retail / E-Commerce·1,001+ employees·Customer Support, Marketing

10x Growth in Product Page Traffic: How 2nd Street Connected Customer Support to Sales

At a glance

• Inquiry volume held flat despite 50+ new store openings and customer growth
• Traffic to trade-in pages increased 10x after strategic FAQ link placement
• FAQ articles began ranking in organic search within months of launch

The Challenge

GEO Holdings' 2nd Street is one of Japan's fastest-growing resale brands, and that growth came with a tax. As stores, customers, and revenue climbed, inquiries climbed right alongside them at almost the same rate. A lot of those questions already had answers sitting on the website. The old self-service experience just didn't help anyone find them: a static wall of text with no search, and a chatbot that pushed customers through rigid menus and dropped them at dead ends. So customers did what people do when a website fails them. They picked up the phone and called the nearest store. Floor staff ended up fielding questions that had nothing to do with the floor. The team needed two things at once: a way for customers to answer their own questions, and the operational data to keep getting better at it.

Why Helpfeel

The team evaluated several help center platforms, and search accuracy decided it. Helpfeel reads past typos and phrasing differences, so a customer reaches the right answer no matter how they word the question. That mattered, because they already knew their existing articles weren't matching the words customers actually typed. Trade-in questions were the clearest example, and trade-ins are one of the most common things customers ask about. Helpfeel's embedded form went a step further. As a customer types their question, relevant articles surface in real time, often answering them before they ever hit submit. When the project went to senior leadership, that was the capability that sold it.

What They Did

• Stood up Helpfeel with a five-person cross-functional team. Uchimura led article creation and configuration, and subject-matter experts from each relevant team verified the content
• Ran monthly reviews with Helpfeel's Customer Success team to build out articles on high-frequency search topics, spot anomalies in the data, and turn what they learned into changes
• Read the traffic data to find their highest-volume articles, then built navigation paths from those articles to pages that convert (for example, linking "items we can't accept" to "how to trade in items" and "what items are accepted")
• Embedded Helpfeel directly into the inquiry form so answers surface as customers type

Results

A year and change after launch, the numbers tell the story. Roughly 50 new stores opened. Customer counts went up. And total inquiry volume stayed about flat. The new questions customers can resolve themselves are getting absorbed by the knowledge base instead of hitting the support queue. Within a few months, organic search traffic started arriving straight on their knowledge articles, especially for trade-in and payment topics. That's the payoff from improving articles one at a time: a customer running a plain internet search now arrives right on the answer they need.

The biggest win came out of the data. The article explaining which items can't be accepted for trade-in was pulling heavy traffic. So the team added links from it to the pages explaining how to trade in items and what items are accepted. After that single change, traffic to the trade-in pages jumped 10x. A knowledge article, wired straight to revenue.

"If customers are having a negative experience, unable to find answers, that needs to be fixed as quickly as possible. A customer left in the dark will move to a competing service immediately. In that sense, Helpfeel is a service with significant value in enabling self-service."

Keita Uchimura, Web Business Division, Web Business Planning

Looking Ahead

Next, the team wants to carry the same results into physical stores, where awareness of self-service is still low. They mentioned it during the website redesign, but never gave customers clear guidance on how to use it. Raising in-store awareness is the priority, and it should pull even more calls away from store staff. Further out, they want to figure out what information on conversion pages would lift trade-in conversion rates, then take what works across the wider GEO Group.

“If customers are having a negative experience, unable to find answers, that needs to be fixed as quickly as possible. A customer left in the dark will move to a competing service immediately. In that sense, Helpfeel is a service with significant value in enabling self-service.”

— Keita Uchimura, Web Business Division, Web Business Planning