150 Branches, One Knowledge Base: How Hokuriku Bank Built an AI-Powered Internal Helpdesk to Break the Inquiry Cycle

Hokuriku Bank, Ltd.

Banking·1,001+ employees·Internal Helpdesk

150 Branches, One Knowledge Base: How Hokuriku Bank Built an AI-Powered Internal Helpdesk to Break the Inquiry Cycle

At a glance

• 1,800 articles published across every operational domain
• 150 branches connected to centralized knowledge base
• 2 dedicated staff previously overwhelmed by recurring inquiries
• Institutional knowledge preserved through rotations and absences

The Challenge

Hokuriku Bank operates 150 branch offices across the Hokuriku region, Hokkaido, and Japan's three major metropolitan areas. Every branch relied on headquarters for answers, but knowledge was scattered. Manuals and reference documents lived in multiple storage locations. Internal communication tools (an intranet, an electronic conference room, a circulation report system, phone calls) created silos. The same questions recurred across different branches because phone and email exchanges were visible only to the parties involved.

The General Affairs Division had 2 dedicated staff handling internal inquiries, but they couldn't cover the volume. Other team members answered requests alongside their regular work. Some inquiries required customer record lookups or accuracy verification and took 30 minutes or more per reply. Knowledge concentrated around subject-matter experts, creating problematic over-reliance on specific individuals.

Under general headcount constraints, the burden of searching through and cross-referencing operational manuals was significant. Staff rotations and extended absences meant institutional know-how was not staying within the organization. The bank needed an environment where less experienced staff, including newer employees, could look up answers independently.

Why Helpfeel

Hokuriku Bank evaluated internal helpdesk tools with one non-negotiable priority: ensuring information reaches staff accurately. In a financial institution where legal compliance and precise customer communication are critical, ambiguity is not an option.

The decision to select Helpfeel came down to three factors: an interface that staff could understand intuitively, the ability to present clear and unambiguous answers, and the strength of the support structure. Helpfeel's AI-powered search and the operational expertise of the Customer Success team offered the foundation the bank needed to build internal information infrastructure that staff would actually use.

What They Did

• Built content from existing data: With almost no articles at launch, the team used Helpfeel's AI-powered draft generation feature to produce article drafts from existing electronic conference room content, avoiding the burden of starting from zero.

• Categorized and prioritized: In consultation with Helpfeel's Customer Success team, the bank categorized the vast body of internal information into domains and prioritized article creation in stages, starting with the highest-priority topics.

• Rewrote for broad applicability: Posts in the electronic conference room were often answers to very specific individual situations, lacking the generality required for a helpdesk article. Each article needed to be rewritten for broad applicability and verified for accuracy. With help from Helpfeel's technical writers, the team spent approximately 3 months refining articles before launch.

• Drove adoption across 150 branches: The team announced updates through monthly circulars, featured Helpfeel explanations in management meetings, and asked branch managers to pass the message along locally. Hearing "let's give it a try" from a familiar face in a direct management role was considered essential for building adoption.

• Built a feedback loop: Using Helpfeel's feedback feature, branch staff now submit requests and suggestions directly on the helpdesk. The most common feedback is requests for articles not yet created. Management-level staff and field sales representatives also submit feedback, highlighting that even during customer meetings in the field, there are frequent moments when staff need to resolve questions instantly.

Results

With 1,800 articles now published, Hokuriku Bank has created a centralized knowledge base that serves all 150 branch offices. Branch staff can resolve questions independently on the front line, reducing the inquiry burden on headquarters.

Tangible productivity improvements are still building, but one significant change is the increased visibility into the current state. Analyzing the volume and content of phone inquiries received by the General Affairs Division has revealed which topics most frequently cause confusion among branch staff and how much time phone handling actually consumes. This data is now being used to prioritize which articles to create next.

Search performance is identified as the most critical feature for getting branch staff to use the system. With 1,800 articles in the system, being able to reliably find the right article quickly is essential to continued use. Equally important, the team notes, is knowing quickly when something isn't there. With Helpfeel's intent-prediction search, it becomes clear immediately whether the content exists, eliminating wasted search time and encouraging staff to "just try Helpfeel first."

"Without Helpfeel's Customer Success team, the improvement structure we have today would not exist. They served as a guide from the very start, making multiple visits to Toyama to understand our operational realities and build a phased improvement plan."

Kitajima Mizuki, Sales Management Division, Senior Staff

Looking Ahead

The priority is continuing to build out helpdesk content. The ideal is for the helpdesk to be comprehensive enough that "checking Helpfeel" becomes a natural, automatic behavior, with staff spontaneously saying to each other on the floor: "If you're not sure, it'll be in Helpfeel."

Evolving the internal helpdesk should reduce the inquiry burden on the General Affairs Division and free up time for more value-creating work, including operational improvement initiatives and planning that benefits customers directly. Looking further ahead, the goal is to rationalize the bank's internal inquiry channels altogether. Currently, staff face a confusing array of options (helpdesk, phone, electronic conference room, circulation reports) and may not know which to use. The vision is for quick questions to be resolved instantly via the helpdesk, while individual cases and complex issues get proper dedicated consultation time.

“Without Helpfeel's Customer Success team, the improvement structure we have today would not exist. They served as a guide from the very start, making multiple visits to Toyama to understand our operational realities and build a phased improvement plan.”

— Kitajima Mizuki, Sales Management Division, Senior Staff