84% Fewer Inquiries in 10 Months: How SOKUYAKU Cut Support Costs in Half

SOKUYAKU / Jay Frontier Co., Ltd.

Healthcare / Telemedicine·1-500 employees·Customer Support

84% Fewer Inquiries in 10 Months: How SOKUYAKU Cut Support Costs in Half

At a glance

• Inquiries cut 84% in 10 months
• Inquiry rate dropped from 40% to 8% of bookings
• Call center costs reduced 70% through insourcing (7-8 outsourced staff to 4 in-house)
• Overall CS costs down ~50% net of Helpfeel fees

The Challenge

SOKUYAKU is a one-stop platform for online medical consultations and prescription delivery, serving busy families across all 47 Japanese prefectures. As the user base grew, so did inquiries from patients and partner pharmacies. Call center labor costs ballooned in step with business growth, becoming a significant financial burden just as the company was transitioning from heavy launch investment to disciplined growth.

The FAQ page already covered most common topics, but the search functionality was limited to keyword matching on article titles only. Users searched, couldn't find answers, and called anyway. Many inquiries were about topics already documented in the FAQ. Even after thoroughly revising the content, the team hit a hard ceiling: title-only search prevented meaningful improvement. The team needed a new FAQ system that could actually connect users to the answers already written.

Why Helpfeel

Helpfeel's search experience was fundamentally different. Instead of returning a single result or requiring an exact title match, Helpfeel displays multiple relevant questions when a keyword is entered. The "word hints" displayed beneath the search box surface commonly searched keywords proactively, preventing excessive fragmentation of search terms and guiding users to resolutions more quickly.

The customer success support model stood out as a key differentiator: rather than leaving clients on their own after onboarding, Helpfeel provides data-driven, objective analysis and recommendations each month, grounded in cross-industry benchmarks.

What They Did

• Reviewed all existing FAQ articles with Helpfeel's customer success team, consolidating duplicates and merging related content
• Restructured all inquiry pathways on the SOKUYAKU service site so every route to submitting an inquiry first passes through the Helpfeel FAQ page
• Launched the FAQ within approximately one month, prioritizing speed to begin reducing basic operational inquiries immediately
• Used the monthly no-hit list (queries that returned zero results) to iteratively add user search keywords directly into article titles, improving discoverability
• Shared precision search data cross-departmentally to identify UI improvement opportunities and product feature gaps

Results

Inquiry volumes began declining immediately after launch. After 10 months, total inquiries had fallen by 84% compared to pre-deployment levels, driven by both Helpfeel's FAQ effectiveness and the redesigned inquiry pathway on the service site. The inquiry rate relative to consultation booking volume dropped dramatically: from 40% before deployment to just 8% at the time of the interview.

With inquiry volumes sufficiently reduced, the company eliminated the outsourced call center for weekday operations entirely, replacing it with an in-house team. The outsourced call center had operated with 7-8 staff members; the insourced team now operates with 4 internal staff. This restructuring reduced call center operating costs by 70%. Even accounting for Helpfeel's licensing fees, overall CS operating costs were reduced by approximately 50%.

The timing was strategically significant: SOKUYAKU had just moved past its initial investment-heavy launch phase and was entering a stage of cost-disciplined growth. Being able to right-size the previously inflated call center costs at this transition point was a major operational and financial achievement. The FAQ page launched in November 2023 and the insourcing was completed by July 2024, a transformation accomplished in under one year.

"Many SaaS tools leave clients to operate largely independently after onboarding, but the effort required to rigorously analyze data and rapidly improve content is not trivial for internal teams to manage alone. The proactive, data-driven proposals from Helpfeel's customer success team created the motivation and momentum needed to fully leverage the system, and were essential to getting operations onto a successful trajectory."

Kenji Yamamuro, SOKUYAKU Business Division

Looking Ahead

For a service like SOKUYAKU, the first-use experience is the decisive factor in whether a user continues. The team's goal is to make that first experience as smooth and satisfying as possible through continued UI improvements and ensuring that any questions arising during or after initial use can be resolved quickly through Helpfeel. Further reducing the proportion of inquiries that could be self-served, improving user satisfaction, and feeding search data into future product development are all priorities going forward.

“Many SaaS tools leave clients to operate largely independently after onboarding, but the effort required to rigorously analyze data and rapidly improve content is not trivial for internal teams to manage alone. The proactive, data-driven proposals from Helpfeel's customer success team created the motivation and momentum needed to fully leverage the system, and were essential to getting operations onto a successful trajectory.”

— Kenji Yamamuro, SOKUYAKU Business Division