70% Fewer Inquiries: How NTT Data MSE Doubled Employee Adoption and Cut Helpdesk Workload with AI

NTT Data MSE Corporation

Technology / IT Services·1,001+ employees·Internal Helpdesk

70% Fewer Inquiries: How NTT Data MSE Doubled Employee Adoption and Cut Helpdesk Workload with AI

At a glance

• Employee utilization doubled from 5-25% to over 60% in six months
• Inquiry-handling workload reduced by up to 70% across business divisions
• Cost savings equivalent to 2 full-time employees per year
• 870 articles prepared within 4 months of launch

The Challenge

NTT Data MSE Corporation employs approximately 2,000 staff and provides IT solutions across IoT, automotive, and mobile domains. As part of a company-wide DX initiative launched in 2022, the company identified a critical bottleneck: information was siloed across 14 departments under 5 business units, each managing knowledge independently with wildly different methods. Some ran intranet helpdesk pages, others used chatbots, and some simply posted PDF files.

Veteran employees who knew where each department's information lived could navigate the system by asking the right person directly. But feedback from employees on secondment and mid-career hires made the problem impossible to ignore. The company needed an internal helpdesk that anyone could use intuitively, without relying on institutional knowledge that took years to build.

Why Helpfeel

When evaluating solutions, NTT Data MSE prioritized two factors: usability and the quality of operational support.

Helpfeel stood out for its polished search experience, including natural language AI-powered search, and an interface so intuitive that employees could use it without training. Since this was a cross-departmental project involving internal coordination, formal approvals, and many organizational hurdles, the availability of hands-on implementation support was critical. The team had no prior experience running a helpdesk operation internally.

Looking ahead to post-launch operations, continuous support from Helpfeel's Customer Success team gave the team confidence. Tools like this require ongoing refinement, and Helpfeel offered a framework to reliably run that PDCA cycle.

What They Did

• Phased rollout by department. Rather than overhauling everything at once, the team took a department-by-department approach. They extracted information from each department's intranet pages and shared folders, compiled article candidates, had staff review them, and converted them into articles. Errors were corrected and duplicate content was consolidated.

• Intentional launch strategy. While article creation was phased, all employees were targeted as users from day one. The goal was twofold: let employees experience how easy it was to find information, and deliberately surface gaps to motivate departments to contribute articles. A one-month parallel operation period alongside old FAQs and chatbots allowed employees to acclimate gradually. Within 4 months of launch, approximately 870 articles had been prepared.

• Branding for approachability. To make the helpdesk feel welcoming, the team named it "MSE Concierge" instead of calling it a helpdesk. A link was placed on the company intranet homepage, with announcements in the information section, executive meetings, and weekly business promotion meetings to drive awareness.

• KPI tracking and iteration. Early on, the team focused on exit rate and tracked "no hit" keywords to identify content gaps. As the article library grew, they shifted focus to re-search rate and search depth as indicators of whether articles were genuinely helping employees.

• Customer Success partnership. Monthly review meetings with Helpfeel's Customer Success team provided data-driven improvement recommendations. Over time, the internal team developed enough understanding to use analytics reports to feed back usage status to each department's helpdesk owner, enabling a continuous improvement cycle.

Results

Within six months of launch, over 60% of all employees were actively using MSE Concierge, compared to just 5-25% who had used the previous chatbot. The number of active users has continued to grow month over month.

Helpfeel reduced employee time spent searching for information and cut the workload of business divisions (both inquiry response time and the time previously spent managing legacy FAQs and chatbots) by up to 70%. Based on internal estimates, the workload reduction achieved in fiscal year 2024 is equivalent to the effort of approximately 2 full-time employees per year in cost terms.

Employees who had originally raised the problem, including those on secondment and mid-career hires, reported that information is now found overwhelmingly faster compared to using the old chatbot or static files. Employees have also begun proactively requesting new articles, reflecting the growing adoption of the platform.

These achievements were recognized internally. MSE Concierge won a company-wide Project Award, honoring not only the Information Systems Department but also helpdesk representatives from each contributing business unit, validating the project's value as a company-wide DX initiative.

"Comments like 'It took me half a day to figure out how to submit an internal request' made it painfully clear that the reliance on tacit knowledge had reached its limits. It became urgent to establish an internal helpdesk that anyone could use intuitively."

Ms. Ueno, Information Systems Department, Internal Systems Division

Looking Ahead

The team plans to use data analytics to identify and fill content gaps. A recent internal system change caused a temporary spike in inquiries, highlighting the need for a proactive operational framework to prepare content ahead of known change events in coordination with other departments.

The team is evaluating Helpfeel's PDF search functionality. Much of the company's policy documentation and manuals exist as PDF files. Currently the helpdesk links to those PDFs. The ability to surface and directly navigate to the relevant section within a PDF would significantly improve the employee experience.

From a company-wide information dissemination perspective, the team also wants to explore push-style notification mechanisms to proactively deliver important information to employees. Currently, employees must actively go find information. The team is exploring ways to design notification integrations and timing to ensure critical updates reliably reach employees.

“Comments like 'It took me half a day to figure out how to submit an internal request' made it painfully clear that the reliance on tacit knowledge had reached its limits. It became urgent to establish an internal helpdesk that anyone could use intuitively.”

— Ms. Ueno, Information Systems Department, Internal Systems Division