40% Fewer Inquiries Despite Rising Orders: SOLIA Frees Time for Customer-Focused Work

SOLIA Co., Ltd.

Retail / E-Commerce·1-500 employees·Customer Support

40% Fewer Inquiries Despite Rising Orders: SOLIA Frees Time for Customer-Focused Work

At a glance

• Inquiries cut 40% while order volume increased, over 1,200 fewer inquiries in absolute terms
• Inquiry rate dropped from 20% to 12% within 9 months
• FAQ bounce rate decreased, customers finding answers faster
• Escalation volume dropped, freeing time for higher-value customer work

The Challenge

SOLIA runs an e-commerce store for cosmetics and health foods, built around ALOBABY, a skincare brand made for babies. Most of the questions coming in were the easy kind. What's in this product. How do I use it. Can I change my address. Can I update how I pay. Parents could have answered these in seconds, and yet the volume never dropped.

A lot of that came down to the tooling. Every change to the help center or the automated chat meant filing an edit request with another department, so there was always a gap between a customer asking something and the answer going live. The chat tool made it worse: each update had to be made in three separate places, which tripled the work and left plenty of room for a fix to go in incomplete. Launch a new product or change a policy, and the team watched unanswered questions pile up faster than they could clear them.

Why Helpfeel

The team had already tried tightening the help center and adjusting the chat tool. It helped, but not enough. So before looking at anything new, they set two requirements. First, the product had to show real inquiry reduction at other companies. Second, Customer Support had to be able to run the help center on its own, without routing every edit through another department.

Helpfeel fit both. It had the implementation record they wanted, and its intent-prediction search let customers find answers in their own words instead of guessing at the right keyword. Before any commitment, the pre-sales team built a mockup of what SOLIA SHOP's help center would look like after launch, so the team could see the result rather than picture it. The Customer Success support that came after launch is what made the decision easy.

What They Did

• Set three KPIs: inquiry rate (inquiries divided by orders, which controls for campaign swings), raw inquiry volume, and the share of inquiries customers could resolve on their own
• Met weekly to review inquiry and search data, adding or updating articles whenever a topic spiked
• Used Helpfeel analytics to watch access trends, the keywords customers searched most, and no-hit searches (terms that returned nothing), so they could answer unmet needs quickly
• Worked with Customer Success to move past simple session counts toward user-centric analysis: did people reach the information they came for, did articles match what they meant, did they give up mid-search
• Edited articles directly in the Helpfeel Cosense interface, seeing every article at a glance, emphasizing content or adding images, and reordering what shows first, all without technical knowledge

Results

Inquiries fell about 40% even as orders went up, more than 1,200 fewer questions in absolute terms. The inquiry rate, inquiries divided by orders, dropped from over 20% before launch to 18% right after, then kept falling to 12% by nine months in.

Repeat questions on the same topic dropped sharply. Bounce rate on the help center fell too, a sign that customers were finding what they needed. And as escalations dropped, the team got back the hours they used to spend handling them. That time now goes to managing the outsourced call center, analyzing what customers need, sharing what they learn with other departments, and making the help center better.

"I always struggled to find time to manage the shopping guide and FAQ. Now I feel like I can genuinely focus on things from the customer's perspective."

Rina Hirano, Customer Support Division

Manager Yuri Suzuki put it plainly: better analysis has surfaced new problems, so the work isn't any easier. But the team spends its energy on customer satisfaction now instead of firefighting.

Looking Ahead

The team wants to push inquiries lower still and open up more time for customer-facing work. Some self-resolvable questions are still coming through, which points to room to improve how customers are guided and how the member page works. More people need to know the help center is there, too. Further out, the goal is to use the analytics to improve the whole store, not just support, and build a shopping experience customers actually enjoy.

Suzuki is clear about where Helpfeel's value comes from. The tool is easy to use, yes. But the depth of the Customer Success support behind it is what sets it apart. For any company facing the same challenges, ease of use and quality of support are what matter most when choosing a help center service.

“I always struggled to find time to manage the shopping guide and FAQ. Now I feel like I can genuinely focus on things from the customer's perspective.”

— Rina Hirano, Customer Support Division