30% Fewer Inquiries During Peak Season: How SBI Ikiiki Insurance Doubled FAQ Use and Scaled Support Without Adding Headcount

SBI Ikiiki Small Amount Short-Term Insurance Co., Ltd.

Insurance·1-500 employees·Customer Support

30% Fewer Inquiries During Peak Season: How SBI Ikiiki Insurance Doubled FAQ Use and Scaled Support Without Adding Headcount

At a glance

• FAQ page views more than doubled from 2,000 to over 4,000 per month
• Article reach rate climbed from 70% to over 80%
• Form inquiries cut 30% for pet insurance, 10% overall
• 130 articles migrated in just over one month

The Challenge

SBI Ikiiki Small Amount Short-Term Insurance manages over 180,000 policies across death, pet, medical, and earthquake insurance. As the company strengthened its digital channels for younger policyholders, especially in pet insurance where customers expect instant online quotes and web-based service, the support experience wasn't keeping up.

The existing FAQ had no user-facing search and offered no visibility into how customers were actually using it. On the backend, an English-language admin interface and cumbersome editing workflow made consistent article maintenance difficult. Worse, the support flow for many inquiries was circuitous: customers would fill out a web form, wait for an email reply, and then be asked to call in to complete the procedure anyway.

For a five-person team responsible for UX improvements, content strategy, and conversion pathways, there was no clear starting point. FAQ traffic was low, there was no data to guide decisions, and the team had no meaningful way to build a cycle of ongoing improvement.

Why Helpfeel

Yuki Nakamura, who leads UX and FAQ operations within the Direct Sales Group, first encountered Helpfeel at an industry event in spring 2023. The immediate standout was the search capability: answer candidates appeared automatically as users typed, no search button required.

After comparing competing products, the decision came down to two factors: the ability to operate with ongoing support informed by user behavior data, and the resulting ability to run a meaningful improvement cycle aimed at growing self-service rates. From an operations perspective, the ability to associate multiple question phrasings with a single common answer reduced article creation and maintenance effort significantly.

Content migration was handled as part of Helpfeel's standard service. All 130 existing articles were migrated in just over one month. The process included not just transferring content, but specific rephrasing suggestions, which Nakamura described as evidence of professional expertise.

What They Did

• Migrated all 130 FAQ articles in just over one month, with rephrasings and structural improvements handled by the Helpfeel team
• Added two to three new FAQ articles per month after launch, expanding to 147 articles by January 2024
• Used Helpfeel's popup (Element) feature to embed FAQ access directly into key pages across the website, increasing touchpoints without requiring customers to navigate away
• Strengthened associations between FAQ content and search keywords to ensure customers could reliably reach the right answers
• Built a regular PDCA cycle for FAQ operations, informed by but not dependent on analysis and proposals from Helpfeel

Results

FAQ page views more than doubled, from approximately 2,000 per month before implementation to over 4,000 per month after. Given that overall site traffic did not change significantly, the team attributes this growth to the success of embedding FAQ access directly into key pages, making it easier for visitors to resolve questions without leaving the page they're on.

Ongoing efforts to eliminate no-hit results improved the FAQ article reach rate from approximately 70% at launch to over 80%. As FAQ articles covering procedures that ultimately require a phone call became more widely read, more customers began calling directly without first going through the inquiry form. This contributed to a reduction in form-based inquiries of approximately 10% overall, and approximately 30% for pet insurance specifically, where web usage at the time of application is particularly high.

The article maintenance workload dropped to a fraction of what it previously required. The team has also been gradually building its own capability to identify and act on improvement opportunities, informed by but not dependent on the analysis and proposals from Helpfeel.

"After approximately six months, the overall progress is going really smoothly. A regular PDCA cycle for FAQ operations, which had previously been underdeveloped, is now firmly established and producing measurable results."

Yuki Nakamura, Senior Staff, Direct Marketing Division

Looking Ahead

Based on the demonstrated results, the company planned to introduce Helpfeel as an internal FAQ for the call center division as well. Having a common tool across both internal and customer-facing functions is expected to make cross-departmental collaboration easier, for example, feeding back insights from phone interactions to further refine the customer-facing FAQ.

From a UX perspective, Nakamura also sees potential for the FAQ to go beyond resolving questions and serve as a bridge to new purchasing decisions, using Helpfeel as a starting point to create pathways toward product introductions and brochure requests.

“After approximately six months, the overall progress is going really smoothly. A regular PDCA cycle for FAQ operations, which had previously been underdeveloped, is now firmly established and producing measurable results.”

— Yuki Nakamura, Senior Staff, Direct Marketing Division