40% Fewer Inquiries in One Month: How FiNC Technologies Scaled Health App Support

FiNC Technologies

Health & Wellness·1-500 employees·Customer Support

40% Fewer Inquiries in One Month: How FiNC Technologies Scaled Health App Support

At a glance

• Inquiries cut 40% in the first month
• Response times improved from 3-4 days to same-day
• 176 FAQ pages unified across 3 services in 6 weeks

The Challenge

FiNC Technologies operates three health and wellness services: FiNC (Japan's #1 healthcare/fitness app by downloads), FiNC Plus (a paid premium version), and FiNC MALL (a wellness marketplace). Each service had its own FAQ system, and none were successfully driving user self-resolution.

Basic questions about app operations and settings kept inquiry volumes consistently high. When FiNC received media coverage and new user numbers spiked, inquiry volumes surged in step, putting significant strain on customer support teams. With limited headcount, the team needed to reduce inquiry volumes by 30% to maintain and improve support quality.

The three services used completely different systems: FiNC used a third-party FAQ platform with UI usability issues and exact keyword matching that often failed to surface relevant content. FiNC MALL used an open-source CMS. FiNC Plus had FAQ content written directly into the service site's code. This fragmentation made management cumbersome and knowledge accumulation difficult. The FiNC system was also restricted to a single designated editor due to licensing constraints, creating a bottleneck.

Why Helpfeel

The team evaluated two other FAQ systems before discovering Helpfeel. One was rejected due to its English-only management interface, which raised concerns about implementation and ongoing operation. The other was eliminated when commercial discussions revealed unexpectedly high costs.

The team needed a system that could migrate all three services' FAQ pages quickly, serve as both an FAQ system and a knowledge-sharing tool, and keep ongoing running costs low. Helpfeel matched these criteria.

FiNC Technologies was already using Cosense (Helpfeel's knowledge-sharing service) internally for meeting minutes, notes, and documentation. The familiar interface meant FAQ pages could be created and knowledge shared with minimal friction. A contact at Helpfeel introduced the team to the FAQ product through that existing relationship.

When the team tested Helpfeel from a user perspective, the search performance was a genuine surprise. Despite having assumed that all FAQ systems would perform roughly the same functionally, the difference with Helpfeel was immediately apparent in hands-on testing.

What They Did

• Migrated 176 FAQ pages across three services in six weeks. Kickoff took place in early July 2020, with the new site going live in mid-August. The internal workload was minimal: text adjustments, word dictionary creation, and detailed setup work were handled by Helpfeel's team.

• Established monthly customer success meetings. Standing meetings with Helpfeel's customer success team deliver detailed reports covering metrics such as search hit rates and bounce rates. These data points form the basis for identifying next actions. The search data also serves as a valuable source of insight into user needs.

• Unified the FAQ platform to create cross-service awareness. Consolidating the three FAQs on a single platform created a pathway for free FiNC users to discover the paid FiNC Plus and FiNC MALL services. The team expects this cross-service visibility to accelerate conversion from free to paid membership over time.

• Enabled simultaneous editing by multiple team members. Removing the previous bottleneck of a single designated editor enabled rapid incorporation of user feedback into content.

Results

Within just one month of deployment, inquiry volume fell by approximately 40% month-over-month, exceeding the team's target of a 30% reduction for the full year of 2020 almost immediately after launch. The improvement was attributed to Helpfeel's superior keyword search performance (handling vague expressions, intuitive language, and spelling errors) combined with a clean, simple design that dramatically improved FAQ usability and user self-resolution rates.

With inquiry volumes reduced, the customer support teams gained sufficient capacity to respond to remaining email and chat inquiries both more thoroughly and more quickly. Response times that had previously stretched to 3-4 days for initial replies improved to same-day responses after Helpfeel was deployed.

"When inquiries decrease, companies are freed from reactive customer handling and can redirect those resources toward service improvements, creating a virtuous cycle of rising customer satisfaction."

Umino Kawaguchi, CRE Group, Technology Development Division

Looking Ahead

A growing trend among modern users is a preference for self-service experiences, resolving issues independently rather than contacting a human representative. Helpfeel is the right tool for realizing self-service customer support.

When evaluating a system migration, functionality and cost are important considerations, but Helpfeel's customer success support was also exceptional. Even with limited internal resources, the migration can be completed smoothly.

“When inquiries decrease, companies are freed from reactive customer handling and can redirect those resources toward service improvements, creating a virtuous cycle of rising customer satisfaction.”

— Umino Kawaguchi, CRE Group, Technology Development Division