# 30% Fewer Inquiries: How S.RIDE Scaled 1.7x with Just One New Hire - Inquiry rate cut 30% relative to active users and orders - Self-resolvable inquiries reduced 20% of total contact volume - Downloads grew 1.7x in one year with just one new support hire (4 to 5 people) - ~200 FAQ articles cover 4,900 question variations via Intent Prediction Search ## The Challenge S.RIDE runs a taxi dispatch app backed by the Sony Group. Roughly 19,000 taxis, 10 major Japanese cities. When mobility demand snapped back after the pandemic and accelerated from March 2023, cumulative downloads grew 1.7x over the next year. That growth hit a five-person support team led by Senior Manager Masashi Adachi. The team fields inquiries from passengers and taxi company partners, answers app store reviews, and turns user feedback into product improvements. As downloads climbed, the inquiries piled up faster than the team could keep pace. Cutting raw inquiry volume was never the goal. Volume climbs with the user base. That's just math. So Adachi's team set a sharper target: lower the inquiry rate relative to active users and dispatch orders. The plan was simple. Route the questions people can answer themselves to self-service, fast, and reserve human support for what actually needs a person. Accidents. Complaints. The cases that demand real, personal attention. ![A S.RIDE team member during the interview](https://n4h88u4sldz4wmyd.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/images/sride_body.jpg) ## Why Helpfeel The team was already running a different help center tool with nearly 200 published articles. When they weighed their options, including bolting a chatbot on top of what they had, the answer was to consolidate. One stronger self-service tool beat maintaining chatbot scripts alongside existing content. Less to operate. Less to break. Helpfeel won on four counts. **Content moved over without a rewrite.** Existing articles transferred and worked right away, with nothing to rebuild from scratch. **Intent Prediction Search.** This was the differentiator. Helpfeel surfaces the right answer even when a customer's wording doesn't match the article text, so a wide range of natural phrasing connects to the right content. **Speed.** The response to keyword input was fast and fluid, and the team noticed it immediately. **Inquiry form integration.** Most of S.RIDE's contacts come through the inquiry form. Helpfeel applies to that form directly, surfacing relevant articles right as someone is about to hit submit. That's self-resolution at the exact moment it counts, with no waiting on a reply. ## What They Did - **Migrated, then started iterating.** After launching in December 2023, the team moved existing articles into Helpfeel with minimal changes, then improved them using daily monitoring of user behavior and monthly reviews with the Helpfeel team. - **Killed no-hit searches.** The team tracked keywords that returned nothing and added or adjusted content to cover them. - **Tamed broad keywords.** Terms like "taxi" and "app" returned too many results to help anyone. The team used Helpfeel's word hints to guide people toward specifics. Type "taxi," and the word hint panel surfaces "dispatch surcharge" as a related term, so users home in on what they actually need. - **Built a curated list of commonly viewed words.** Frequent terms like "dispatch surcharge" and "receipt" sit right on the help center screen, each linking straight to the relevant topic. - **Worked across teams.** Adachi talks with the head of S.RIDE's app service planning almost daily. Watching Helpfeel usage trends shows what people search for but current content doesn't explain well, which lets the two teams coordinate fixes, like adding a short in-app note that links out to a fuller article. - **Let the data write content.** When "labor pains" started showing up in search history, the team added an article with contact details for each taxi company's priority maternity taxi service, so pregnant users can find the right number fast. - **Used it inside and out.** The help center was built for customers, but its constantly updated content and easy operation made it useful internally too. Employees are told to search it first with questions about S.RIDE's own services, which holds down internal inquiries and keeps reference material in one place. More eyes on the content also means typos, outdated entries, and inconsistent terms get caught and reported faster. ## Results Monthly active users grew. Dispatch orders grew. The inquiry rate, measured against MAU and order numbers, still fell by up to 30% after Helpfeel went in. The share of total inquiries about self-resolvable topics dropped by up to roughly 20%, which means more customers are finding their own answers before they ever contact support. As demand recovered and downloads grew 1.7x in a year, the support team added exactly one person, going from four to five, and still finishes all its work inside regular business hours. Adachi credits Helpfeel directly with containing what could have been a brutal jump in workload. Roughly 200 articles plus Intent Prediction Search now cover about 4,900 distinct question variations, and the wider company has taken note. With self-service handling more of the resolvable questions, the support team gets to focus on the inquiries that genuinely need a human: accidents, complaints, and the situations that call for nuanced, personal handling. ## Looking Ahead Next, the team plans to extend Helpfeel's Contact Sense integration to the in-app inquiry form, not just the web version. Since most contacts start there, guiding self-resolution at that point should push the self-resolution rate higher still. In April 2024, Japan opened taxi operators to ride-share. S.RIDE folded ride-share dispatch into the app and added content on how the new service works. Regulations around mobility keep shifting, and Adachi sees Helpfeel's job, getting new features and usage guidance to customers quickly, growing more important as they do. The core taxi dispatch business is already profitable. Looking further out, the Sony Group has asked S.RIDE to make the service usable by anyone through accessibility improvements, and to build experiences where mobility itself becomes the destination, autonomous vehicles included. As the service grows, keeping customer-facing information current will sit at the center of the experience, and Helpfeel is the tool the team counts on for that work.