50% Better Search Results in One Week: How Raksul Scaled Customer Support Through Peak Season

Raksul Inc.

E-Commerce / Marketplace·501-1,000 employees·Customer Support

50% Better Search Results in One Week: How Raksul Scaled Customer Support Through Peak Season

At a glance

• Search hit rate improved 50% within one week of deployment
• No-hit rate decreased 32%, directing customers to the right answers
• Inquiry reduction of ~20% during cross-departmental FAQ improvement efforts
• Handled TV commercial surges and COVID-19 inquiry spikes without overwhelming the support team

The Challenge

Raksul Inc. runs a lot of businesses under one roof: online printing and marketing support, logistics, TV commercial services, and corporate IT platforms. On the flagship Raksul service, most of the people contacting support are first-timers trying to order print online for the first time. And the learning curve is steep. They have to choose between dozens of paper types that vary by thickness and finish, figure out the data file requirements, and follow steps that traditional offline print shops never asked of them.

So Raksul built a help center. Roughly 700 articles, written to let customers find their own answers. But the search underneath it had a problem.

Printing is full of words that mean the same thing. A "flyer" might be a "pamphlet," a "leaflet," or a "pera," a Japanese printing term. A "sticker," a "label," and a "seal" are all the same thing to the person typing. The old keyword-matching search only returned a result when the customer used the exact word Raksul had used. Anything else came back empty. Four out of every ten searches found nothing.

Here's what that does. Customers can't find the answer, so they contact a human. Human-handled inquiries stay high. The support team works under pressure that never lets up. And the whole time, TV commercial campaigns were pulling in waves of new customers, each peak threatening to bury support all over again.

Why Helpfeel

Raksul didn't sit still. The team ran a cross-departmental project to overhaul the help center and cut inquiry rates by about 20%. Good result. But they hit a wall. Better content alone couldn't push the number any further, and hiring more agents every time the business grew was never going to hold. Plenty of customers would rather solve the problem themselves than wait on support, so whatever came next had to make self-service actually work.

Raksul's COO first ran into Helpfeel at an industry event. He tried Helpfeel-powered sites himself and the search response surprised him: fast, and flexible about how people phrased things. It helped that a long list of well-known companies in the same e-commerce space were already running it. The last piece was the customer success support that comes with Helpfeel. The team already knew that analyzing and improving a help center is real, ongoing work, so having hands-on help with that was a deciding factor.

What They Did

• Deployed Helpfeel on the Raksul website's public FAQ
• Integrated Helpfeel with both the existing FAQ system and chatbot UI features
• Used Helpfeel's customer success support for ongoing analysis and content optimization

Results

One week in, the search hit rate was up 50% and the no-hit rate had dropped by about 32%. Customers could find the right answer and get on with it. The team had braced for slow gains over six months of iterating. Getting there in a week was a genuine surprise.

Then the campaigns showed what it was really worth. New customers spike hard when the commercials run, and inquiries climb right alongside them. During the rollout it got harder still: COVID-19 hit, state-of-emergency declarations and their lifting set off waves of new orders and cancellations, and inquiry volume ran past every projection. Because Helpfeel was already live, customers kept resolving things on their own, and the inquiries that needed a human stayed in check.

"Without Helpfeel in place at that timing, inquiries to customer support could have flooded in and made operations unmanageable."

Takeki Tashiro, Executive Officer and COO of the Raksul Business Division

Looking Ahead

Helpfeel moved the customer experience at Raksul forward in a real way. When customers can answer their own questions and use the service without friction, they come back, and Raksul expects that to show up in repeat purchase rates. The team sees Helpfeel as a tool for companies that treat customer support as a driver of operational quality and business value rather than a cost to contain.

From here, Raksul wants to push both the quality and the efficiency of support, and to open up new support channels as customer needs change. All of it in service of a better experience for the people on the other end.

“Without Helpfeel in place at that timing, inquiries to customer support could have flooded in and made operations unmanageable.”

— Takeki Tashiro, Executive Officer and COO of the Raksul Business Division