20% More Customers Finding Answers: How a Regional Bank Put AI Search at the Center of Digital Service

Iyo Bank, Ltd.

Banking·1,001+ employees·Customer Support

20% More Customers Finding Answers: How a Regional Bank Put AI Search at the Center of Digital Service

At a glance

• Page reach rate improved 20 percentage points (50% to 70%)
• 15 hours per month of operational time saved
• FAQ maintenance staff reduced from 3 to 2
• FAQ search hit rate reached ~95%

The Challenge

Iyo Bank, headquartered in Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture, has been aggressively pursuing digitalization under the slogan "Iyo Bank is becoming a D-H-D Bank (Digital, Human, Digital Bank)." With branch traffic declining industry-wide, particularly after COVID-19, expanding and enhancing non-branch, web-based customer touchpoints became a strategic priority.

The bank had long relied on an FAQ system and chatbot to help customers resolve questions on their own. Both systems showed limitations in search performance, working on a one-to-one relationship between questions and answers that made it difficult to surface the right answer when customers typed in a wide variety of expressions. Meanwhile, the FAQ site remained one of the most viewed pieces of content the bank published, making it clear that customer demand was significant. Improving the FAQ site was critical to improving non-branch customer touchpoints.

Operationally, maintaining approximately 800 FAQ pages created substantial workload for the staff responsible for creating, editing, and analyzing content. The system itself was cumbersome to configure and operate. Customer support from the vendor was limited to email-only inquiries, with responses coming back in English.

Why Helpfeel

Ryuhei Takahashi, Section Manager in the Business Marketing Division, had been continuously researching FAQ systems but couldn't find anything that gave him a genuine "that's the one!" reaction. Everything felt like more of the same.

When a work acquaintance told him about "a really interesting product," Takahashi looked at the proposal materials. His reaction: pure surprise. "This is incredible." The approach was completely different from conventional chatbots and FAQ systems that link a question to a single answer. The idea of first inferring the user's "question" from a search keyword felt genuinely customer-centric and original.

Concretely, Helpfeel displays predicted question candidates based on the search keyword. For example, typing "seal" (hanko) surfaces the question "I've lost my registered seal, who should I contact?" while the user is still typing. The mechanism of predicting the "question" in the user's mind and surfacing search results accordingly struck Takahashi as truly innovative. He decided to move forward immediately.

What They Did

• Migrated approximately 800 FAQ pages from the legacy system to Helpfeel in about one month
• Reviewed and revised existing FAQ pages during the migration based on concrete improvement suggestions from Helpfeel's Customer Success team
• Established monthly online review meetings with Customer Success to analyze usage data and guide FAQ content additions and revisions
• Reallocated resources freed up by reduced maintenance workload to other tasks

Results

Iyo Bank launched a new service at approximately the same time as the Helpfeel rollout and anticipated a temporary surge in inquiries. In reality, they were able to suppress that increase. The team believes this was the direct result of Helpfeel enabling customers to resolve their own questions more effectively.

Looking at actual usage data, the FAQ search hit rate (the percentage of searches that return at least one result) reached approximately 95%, meaning virtually any combination of words a customer uses will return search results. This materially increased the reliability of the FAQ.

Under the previous FAQ system, the page reach rate (the percentage of users who reach an actual FAQ page after searching) was approximately 50%, meaning many customers who searched were unable to find an answer and left the FAQ. After implementing Helpfeel, the page reach rate improved to approximately 70%, an increase of around 20 percentage points. In other words, significantly more customers are now discovering the FAQ page that resolves their question through keyword search.

Thanks to ongoing support from Helpfeel's Customer Success team, the bank dramatically reduced the burden of FAQ site maintenance, cutting approximately 15 hours per month of operational work. As a result, they were able to reallocate resources to other tasks and reduce the number of dedicated FAQ maintenance staff from 3 to 2.

The monthly review meetings built a strong internal reputation. "The proposals are packed with know-how and genuinely educational!" one team member said. One staffer who was reassigned to a different department due to an organizational restructuring even requested to keep attending the Helpfeel monthly review meetings after moving on.

"Not only will the FAQ site's usability improve dramatically, but our maintenance workload is going to shrink significantly too!"

Rie Hashimoto, Business Marketing Division, Sales Headquarters

Looking Ahead

Iyo Bank will continue advancing the DX of its services and operations in line with the D-H-D Bank model, with the goal of delivering ever-greater value to customers. The bank sees Helpfeel as a solution that plays a truly central role in the DX of non-branch customer touchpoints in particular, and plans to continue leveraging Helpfeel fully, with an eye on a wide range of potential applications going forward.

“Not only will the FAQ site's usability improve dramatically, but our maintenance workload is going to shrink significantly too!”

— Rie Hashimoto, Business Marketing Division, Sales Headquarters