25% Fewer Inquiries in One Month: How Persol Business Process Design Scaled Internal Support for 4,600 Employees

Persol Business Process Design Co., Ltd.

Professional Services / Consulting·1,001+ employees·Internal Helpdesk

25% Fewer Inquiries in One Month: How Persol Business Process Design Scaled Internal Support for 4,600 Employees

At a glance

• Inquiries cut 25% within one month
• FAQ usage rate increased ~10% within two months
• 3-person Concierge Desk team serving ~4,600 employees
• 95% first-response-within-15-minutes SLA maintained

The Challenge

Persol Business Process Design's internal helpdesk, the Concierge Desk, serves approximately 4,600 employees across a diverse set of needs: IT systems, HR, accounting, and general operations. The three-person team had successfully built a strong self-service culture, about 60% of employees turned to the FAQ when they encountered a problem. But the existing FAQ system relied on exact-match keyword search, and that foundation was cracking. Employees who didn't type the precise right keyword either got zero results or were buried in irrelevant articles. The team tried embedding multiple search terms in each FAQ to compensate, but that just made the noise worse. Internal surveys confirmed the frustration: people wanted to help themselves, but the tool kept getting in the way. The opportunity was clear, if search worked better, the already-strong culture of self-service could become a real competitive advantage.

Why Helpfeel

Kenta Ito, who leads the Concierge Desk, was drawn first to Helpfeel's stated 98% search hit rate. Coming from a system that routinely returned zero results, the promise that employees could phrase questions naturally, colloquially, with typos, or intuitively, and still reliably reach the right answer, stood out immediately. When he tested Helpfeel on a live customer site, it performed exactly as advertised: variations in phrasing, expression, and even mistakes all returned the correct article. The conclusion was straightforward: with Helpfeel, the FAQ could become a genuinely reliable first stop for employees, freeing the small Concierge Desk team to focus on the inquiries that needed human judgment, and helping them consistently hit their 15-minute first-response SLA. Ito also appreciated the clean, minimal user interface, something he described as a feature he "loved."

What They Did

• Parallel launch with promotion: Helpfeel was introduced in June 2021 alongside the existing FAQ system, with approximately 500 internal articles published. The team promoted the new FAQ at a company-wide all-hands meeting, explicitly encouraging employees to use it.
• Streamlined article maintenance: With Helpfeel's search working reliably, the old practice of stuffing articles with diverse keywords to compensate for poor search was abandoned. Articles became cleaner, more readable, and written for humans rather than for gaming a search engine.
• Focus on usage analytics: The team planned monthly review meetings to systematically examine search keyword data, article view patterns, and re-search rates, translating insights into ongoing FAQ improvements.

Results

Within one month of Helpfeel's introduction, human-handled inquiries to the Concierge Desk fell approximately 25% compared to the pre-launch baseline. Both recurring seasonal questions, like health check inquiries, and general IT system questions decreased noticeably. Within two months, the proportion of employees actively using the FAQ to search for information increased by approximately 10%, a direct reflection of the improved, more reliable search experience driving greater engagement.

The improvement was visible enough that other departments began approaching the Concierge Desk to request Helpfeel adoption in their own areas. Employees even proposed offering it as a recommendation to clients. The quality of the experience had generated genuine internal advocacy. With keyword-stuffing no longer required, FAQ articles became cleaner and more useful, written from the reader's perspective rather than the search engine's perspective.

"With Helpfeel, the FAQ would become a tool employees could genuinely rely on for self-resolution, freeing the Concierge Desk team to focus its human attention on the inquiries that truly needed personalized handling."

Kenta Ito, Digital Promotion Group, Infrastructure Operations Division

Looking Ahead

Ito and his team plan to place greater emphasis on usage analytics, particularly search keyword data, article view patterns, and re-search rates, to identify where the FAQ can be further improved. Monthly review meetings are planned to systematically translate analysis into concrete improvement actions. The broader goal is to use Helpfeel to deepen the culture of self-service across all approximately 4,600 staff, establishing a workplace norm where looking up the answer yourself is the default first response. The Concierge Desk's role as a critical enabler of company-wide productivity is clear, and Helpfeel is the tool that makes the team's work both scalable and high-quality.

“With Helpfeel, the FAQ would become a tool employees could genuinely rely on for self-resolution, freeing the Concierge Desk team to focus its human attention on the inquiries that truly needed personalized handling.”

— Kenta Ito, Digital Promotion Group, Infrastructure Operations Division