70% Fewer Inquiries During Peak Season: How MUJI Scaled CX While Growing Sales

MUJI (Ryohin Keikaku Co., Ltd.)

Retail / E-Commerce·1,001+ employees·Customer Support

70% Fewer Inquiries During Peak Season: How MUJI Scaled CX While Growing Sales

At a glance

• Active user count grew 150%+ year-on-year, yet inquiry volume was suppressed
• Inquiries reduced by 70% in peak months
• FAQ article publication time cut from up to 2 weeks to immediate

The Challenge

MUJI runs the MUJI brand across more than 1,300 stores at home and abroad. As sales climbed, so did the questions. During peak periods, the team couldn't keep up.

The product range is the reason. MUJI sells a ¥70 eraser, a sofa, and a week's groceries, and every category brings its own kind of question. More customers were shopping in stores and online both, and human-staffed support hit its ceiling. Plenty of online shoppers who'd have happily solved their own problem on the web were picking up the phone instead.

The help center was part of the problem. The EC division owned it, not the Customer Relations Office, so the people closest to customers couldn't add or fix an article when they needed to. Some updates took up to two weeks to go live. Seasonal content and answers for new products showed up after customers had already gone looking for them. Search made it worse: keyword results came back newest first, so the most useful article was often buried under the most recent one. Staff couldn't trust it either, which sent the same questions back to product managers again and again and left the same issue handled three different ways.

Why Helpfeel

The Customer Relations Office opened a review with the EC and IT divisions and set two requirements. First, the team had to be able to manage the knowledge base on their own, with no code and no IT ticket. Second, search had to actually surface the right answer. Nobody had been looking at how the help center was used, so they also needed real usage data to make decisions. EC and IT chose Helpfeel.

What They Did

• Wrote an internal content guideline so every article followed the same structure and tone, then rewrote all existing articles to match it during the move to Helpfeel
• Grew the content beyond online-store how-tos to cover in-store information and product-specific questions, prioritizing by sales volume and how often each question came in
• Worked with the product and EC teams to put article links right on the product pages for high-traffic categories like health and beauty
• Featured seasonal answers the moment they mattered (sunscreen in early spring, for example) and published them the same day instead of waiting weeks
• Made the Customer Relations Office a cross-department hub, feeding customer signals back to EC, IT, and sales so feedback turned into real product and service changes

Results

October 2024 brought "MUJI Week," the member campaign that always sent inquiries spiking. This time, sales grew and inquiry volume stayed flat. In past years the team couldn't get to every customer in time during that window. That's gone. Inquiries dropped 70% in peak months even as the online store's active user count passed 150% year over year.

The help center's bounce rate fell, a sign customers are finding their answers. New hires can now field inquiries by checking the knowledge base on their own, so they get up to speed faster. Onboarding is quicker because of it.

Other departments using it had the same reaction: it's easy. A short how-to video at launch was all any cross-department team needed to start writing articles, no IT involvement required.

Those "MUJI Week" numbers got attention across the company and raised the profile of the Customer Relations Office. Takako Akamine, who heads it, pointed to Helpfeel's tag-based system (Helpfeel Cosense) as a more modern way to structure knowledge. Instead of managing long spreadsheet lists, the team works with a fluid, networked model, and it pushed them to rethink their own assumptions about how information should be organized.

"Our perception of what an FAQ can be has fundamentally changed. It used to feel like a supporting role in customer service. Now we see it as equally important as phone and email support, and as something worth continuously improving, not just deploying and forgetting."

Mami Masumoto, CX Promotion Division

Looking Ahead

The goal is zero inquiries. A customer should be able to shop start to finish without ever stopping to ask, and just get on with it. And the team wants the help center to do more than solve problems. They're after articles so genuinely useful that customers come back to them on purpose, not only when something breaks.

They'll keep reading both the Helpfeel data and direct customer feedback to sharpen article quality and feed what they learn into product development. They also plan to bring in AI and other new tools to raise the bar on both help center operations and how they talk to customers.

“Our perception of what an FAQ can be has fundamentally changed. It used to feel like a supporting role in customer service. Now we see it as equally important as phone and email support, and as something worth continuously improving, not just deploying and forgetting.”

— Mami Masumoto, CX Promotion Division