7,000 Daily Inquiries Resolved: How Nagoya Scaled COVID-19 Vaccine Support Without Adding Headcount

City of Nagoya

Government / Public Sector·1,001+ employees·Customer Support

7,000 Daily Inquiries Resolved: How Nagoya Scaled COVID-19 Vaccine Support Without Adding Headcount

At a glance

• 7,000 daily FAQ accesses at peak during vaccine rollout
• Equivalent impact of adding ~300 operators to call center capacity
• 85%+ answer rate maintained even during peak periods
• 190 FAQ articles covering reservations, precautions, and vaccine information

The Challenge

Nagoya, Japan's third-largest government-designated city with over 2.3 million residents, faced an unprecedented surge in citizen inquiries when COVID-19 vaccine rollout began in April 2021. Even after expanding to 125 phone lines, the city's call center was overwhelmed: 80,000 calls per day flooded in, and most could not be answered. Citizens who couldn't get through by phone began forming queues at ward offices, requiring the city to deploy staff on-site to help residents make smartphone reservations. As eligibility was set to expand to younger age groups, nearly doubling the eligible population, the city recognized the need for new information channels that would enable citizens to find answers before resorting to a phone call.

Why Helpfeel

The city consulted with the outsourced operator managing the vaccine call center, which had prior implementation experience with Helpfeel and proposed it as a tool that could function as a 24-hour, 365-day online support window. Compared to printed flyers enclosed with vaccination tickets, Helpfeel offered the advantage of reflecting the latest information at all times with no print lead time. While the city's website constantly published updated information, the need to cover every edge case created a dilemma: the more thorough the writing, the harder it became for any individual reader to find what was relevant to them. Helpfeel's ability to let users search for exactly what they wanted to know and receive a clean, simple answer addressed this directly.

The intent-prediction search function was particularly highly rated. For example, surfacing "reissuance of vaccination ticket" as a result when users searched for colloquial terms like "lost it" or "misplaced it" bridged the gap between everyday conversational language and the official terminology used in public health communications. The city also used a conversational chatbot for COVID-19 communications, but reliably interpreting user intent and delivering resolution through a dialogue format proved difficult. Helpfeel's consistent ability to understand citizen intent was seen as a key advantage.

What They Did

• Launched a Vaccine FAQ Site in August 2021 with approximately 190 articles covering topics such as how to make vaccination reservations and precautions before and after vaccination
• Printed the FAQ URL as a QR code on the informational flyer enclosed with every vaccination ticket mailing sent to residents to maximize awareness
• Entrusted day-to-day FAQ operations to an experienced vendor partner, with monthly reporting and ongoing email communication to review results and identify issues
• Conducted a focused effort to continuously improve cases where user searches returned zero results (no-hit instances), ultimately achieving near-comprehensive coverage of actual questions being asked
• Adopted the finalized FAQ content as an internal reference manual for call center operators, enabling consistent and unified responses across all channels

Results

The FAQ site received up to 7,000 accesses per day at peak. Given that the vast majority of visits resulted in self-resolution, the city treated each FAQ access as equivalent to one phone call answered. Calculated against the call center's actual response performance, handling 7,000 inquiries per day via FAQ was assessed as delivering the equivalent impact of adding approximately 300 operators. This contributed to substantially alleviating congestion at the call center, which had scaled to a maximum of 400 lines, and maintaining an answer rate of 85% or higher even during peak periods.

One notable trend observed in the FAQ data: searches related to vaccination certificates (vaccine passports) for overseas travel were disproportionately common in the FAQ, a pattern that differed from the call center, where more immediate vaccination scheduling questions dominated. This suggested that FAQ is particularly well-suited for topics where citizens need to reliably retrieve important information at any time of day, rather than for urgent, time-sensitive matters.

"Even outside call center operating hours, the FAQ received constant access throughout the night, including at 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. The system functioned exactly as intended: a 24-hour, 365-day self-service inquiry window for citizens."

Fumika Hayashi, Specialist, COVID-19 Countermeasures Office

Looking Ahead

Government information must be communicated in ways that are accessible to everyone. An FAQ tool like Helpfeel can be used by anyone capable of internet searching on a smartphone, regardless of age. Citizens can access it at whatever time is convenient, and can take screenshots to retain the information they find. The proportion of citizens who find an FAQ more convenient than calling a phone helpline is likely to continue growing. For self-resolution of questions with single, straightforward answers, a well-designed FAQ tool like Helpfeel is an effective and proven approach.

“Even outside call center operating hours, the FAQ received constant access throughout the night, including at 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. The system functioned exactly as intended: a 24-hour, 365-day self-service inquiry window for citizens.”

— Fumika Hayashi, Specialist, COVID-19 Countermeasures Office