8,500 Hours Saved: How Life Card Built Smartphone-First Support for Gen Z

Life Card Co., Ltd.

Financial Services·1-500 employees·Customer Support

8,500 Hours Saved: How Life Card Built Smartphone-First Support for Gen Z

At a glance

• Support workload reduced 8,500 hours/year
• FAQ view rate achieved 17× baseline (1.7× the 10× target)
• Inquiries cut 5,000 cases/month despite growing cardholders
• FAQ operations streamlined from 2 staff to 1

The Challenge

Life Card Co., Ltd. offers credit cards including the no-annual-fee "Life Card," frequently chosen by Gen Z customers as their first credit card. The company was handling 55,000 inquiries per month, with phone lines severely congested on the 27th of each month (direct debit date) and after long holidays. The majority of these questions covered basic topics already documented in the FAQ: payment confirmation, transaction history, and cancellation.

The existing FAQ had limited analytics (only page views and a simple Good/Bad rating), and customers simply weren't using it. No matter how comprehensive the information was, if customers couldn't find what they needed, the FAQ served no purpose. The team needed a system that could provide detailed data on customer behavior and fundamentally improve the self-service experience.

Why Helpfeel

Life Card discovered Helpfeel through their group company, Aiful, which had already adopted it. Three capabilities stood out:

Search performance. When the team tested Aiful's FAQ, they were impressed by how search results appeared as soon as you started typing, before you'd even finished entering your keyword. They felt confident this would satisfy customers who prioritize "time performance" (getting value out of every minute).

Data analytics. Helpfeel's built-in analytics dashboard would consolidate all data in one place, eliminating the need to download and manually analyze data by hand.

Customer Success support. For the FAQ operations lead, having an expert walk alongside the team and offer advice and proposals they would never think of on their own sealed the decision.

What They Did

• Set clear KPIs focused on self-service. The team launched with a target of 10× improvement in FAQ view rate (FAQ views ÷ inquiry volume), and continuously verified they were providing the right content by monitoring article reach rate and tracking no-hit keywords.

• Built a smartphone-first experience. With 90% of customers accessing the FAQ from smartphones, the team focused on creating articles that were easy to read on a smartphone screen, with images optimized for mobile. Helpfeel's drag-and-drop image editing made this dramatically easier, allowing FAQ operations to shift from a two-person team to one person handling it entirely.

• Used analytics to understand the full customer journey. The team prioritized understanding the full picture of customers' search behavior. Helpfeel's analytics dashboard visualized, step by step, what kinds of questions customers were looking for, what they searched for, and whether they successfully self-resolved, making bottlenecks immediately clear.

• Leveraged Customer Success insights. The CS team provided third-party perspective the internal team wouldn't notice themselves. For example, they alerted the team that a basic article on "card reissuance" was missing, a topic the team had taken for granted as requiring human contact. They also provided advice on tuning articles to appear in the right searches and making them more readable for customers.

Results

Life Card initially set a target of 10× improvement in FAQ view rate. They are now achieving 16-17× the view rate, reaching 1.7× their original target. The habit of customers checking the FAQ before reaching out is becoming established.

Even as the number of cardholders continues to grow, inquiry volume has decreased by approximately 5,000 cases per month. Assuming 7 inquiries handled per hour, this translates to 714 hours per month, or approximately 8,500 hours per year of reduced support workload.

Because Helpfeel makes it easy to update FAQ articles, the team can quickly add or update content ahead of campaigns and feature releases. In the past, these events would cause inquiry spikes. Now, by preparing the FAQ in advance, many customers view those articles proactively, and the team has been able to suppress sudden surges in inquiries.

The nature of inquiries has also changed. Support agents handling live chat and email have noticed an increase in customers who have already read the FAQ before reaching out. Some even include the URL of the FAQ article they read in their inquiry form submission. Being able to understand "what the customer already knows" means less back-and-forth, shorter handling time per inquiry, and improved customer satisfaction.

"We view the FAQ not just as a tool for reducing inquiries, but as a valuable data resource for understanding customer needs."

Fukunaga, Section Chief

Looking Ahead

Life Card's ultimate goal is to achieve zero inquiries by providing a customer experience where searching feels intuitive and optimal answers are immediately at hand.

The team plans to use search logs and inquiry content commercially as well, suggesting the most relevant services (like credit limit increases or installment payment options) at the right moment for each customer. Looking further ahead, they want to integrate customer account data with FAQ data to enable more personalized information delivery, where the information you want to know appears naturally, exactly when you need it. This kind of new customer experience will contribute to improved satisfaction and business growth.

“We view the FAQ not just as a tool for reducing inquiries, but as a valuable data resource for understanding customer needs.”

— Fukunaga, Section Chief