60% Fewer Inquiries in One Month: How Karaoke Pasela Centralized National Support with Helpfeel

Newton Inc.

Entertainment / Hospitality·1-500 employees·Customer Support

60% Fewer Inquiries in One Month: How Karaoke Pasela Centralized National Support with Helpfeel

At a glance

• Inquiries cut 60% within one month of launch
• Support centralized to head office with significantly reduced headcount
• Company-wide consistency in responses achieved for the first time
• Contact Center Award 2024 People Division Prize winner

The Challenge

Newton Inc. operates Karaoke Pasela, a national karaoke chain offering multi-purpose room rental, and GRACE BALI, a private event space for parties and banquets. For years, each branch handled its own customer support: phone lines, FAQ pages, the works. The fragmentation created three problems.

First, cost. Every location absorbed its own inquiry overhead, and the most common questions (how to connect a smartphone to the room's TV, whether outside food was allowed) were high-frequency and recurring. These questions arrived during the venue-selection stage, meaning slow or inconsistent responses risked losing customers before they even booked.

Second, inconsistency. Customers received different answers depending on which branch they called, creating the impression that "each location does things differently." This made the problem self-perpetuating: customers who experienced inconsistent responses were more likely to call again rather than trust the FAQ the next time they visited a new location.

Third, search failure. The existing FAQ systems couldn't accommodate different ways of expressing the same question. If a customer's keyword didn't precisely match article text, they got no results and ended up calling.

Newton decided to consolidate all customer support at head office. A centralized team with reduced headcount would only be viable if the FAQ could absorb the bulk of inquiries that had previously been handled individually by each branch.

Why Helpfeel

After evaluating multiple FAQ systems, Head of Sales Promotion Tomoyuki Kitami's overall assessment was that virtually all competing products failed to meaningfully satisfy customer needs. The baseline expectation had become that FAQ tools simply wouldn't perform well, and that was just accepted. Helpfeel was the only system that delivered the search experience customers actually expected.

His first reaction to seeing Helpfeel's search experience was genuine excitement. While the initial appearance resembles any other FAQ (a search box, a magnifying glass button, commonly searched articles below), the behavior after typing is unmistakably different. As keywords are entered, article candidates update in real time, anticipating the user's intent and surfacing relevant content before the search is even completed. This "getting ahead" of the user's needs was something he had not seen in any other FAQ system.

Before selecting Helpfeel, Kitami reviewed live FAQ sites of other companies already using the product. He was impressed by how cleanly the Helpfeel interface integrated with each company's own site design, maintaining visual consistency with the parent brand without jarring the user.

What They Did

• Deployed FAQ entry points on the Karaoke Pasela top page ("Frequently Asked Questions / Contact Us") and GRACE BALI's banquet and party page, both powered by Helpfeel.
• Integrated Helpfeel's inquiry form feature, which predicts and displays relevant FAQ articles based on what a user is typing into the contact submission form. This creates a second self-service intervention point: even at the moment a customer is about to submit a contact request, relevant content is surfaced, giving them a final opportunity to resolve their question without completing the submission.
• Migrated per-branch FAQs into a single unified Helpfeel FAQ, with Helpfeel's Customer Success team reviewing not just the technical transfer but also the content itself, proposing improvements to individual articles and the overall structure. The consolidation became an opportunity to upgrade content quality at the same time.
• Established monthly review sessions with the Customer Success team, receiving data-driven improvement recommendations covering FAQ usage patterns, article-level analytics, and keyword search maintenance. The team also receives feedback on the content of inquiries submitted through the contact form, providing intelligence on customer needs that informs new product ideas and business development planning.

Results

Within one month of launch, human-handled inquiries dropped by approximately 60%. The centralized head office contact team, operating with significantly fewer staff than the previous distributed model, was able to manage the reduced volume without the window becoming overwhelmed.

Company-wide alignment on how to answer customer questions was achieved for the first time. Kitami noted this had meaningful brand value as well as operational benefit: customers now receive the same answer regardless of which channel or location they interact with.

The team is also planning to use the FAQ as an internal training and reference tool for new staff education, leveraging the consistency and accessibility of the centralized knowledge base.

At the Contact Center Award 2024 (September 2024), Newton Inc., presenting as part of the NS Group, received the People Division Prize for the Karaoke Pasela inquiry consolidation and DX initiative. The award, which focuses on human capital aspects of contact center excellence, recognized the achievement of launching a contact center from scratch in a short timeframe with a lean team while meaningfully improving customer satisfaction scores.

"Helpfeel was the only system that delivered the search experience customers actually expected from the first touch. In that light, the choice had no real competition."

Tomoyuki Kitami, Head of Sales Promotion Department

Looking Ahead

Among companies that operate real-world physical spaces or sell physical products, the instinct to leverage online tools for marketing and customer support has historically been slow to develop. Yet investing in online customer support directly drives customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, cost reduction, and staff workload relief.

Beyond the core function of guiding customers to self-resolution through superior search, Helpfeel's search data provides a quantitative window into customer needs, surfacing signals that would otherwise be invisible in an offline-only operation and generating new business opportunity insights in the process.

“Helpfeel was the only system that delivered the search experience customers actually expected from the first touch. In that light, the choice had no real competition.”

— Tomoyuki Kitami, Head of Sales Promotion Department