90% Fewer Inquiries: How a Streetwear Brand Shifted from Support Firefighting to Customer Success

B's International Co., Ltd.

Retail / E-Commerce·1-500 employees·Customer Support

90% Fewer Inquiries: How a Streetwear Brand Shifted from Support Firefighting to Customer Success

At a glance

• Monthly inquiries cut 90%, from 2,000 to under 200
• First-contact resolution rate improved from 70% to 90%
• Self-resolution target set at 80% by end of February 2024

The Challenge

B's International runs streetwear brands that move serious volume: XLARGE, X-girl, MILKFED., and SILAS. Behind all of it sat a four-person Customer Success team, and they were drowning.

Monthly inquiries peaked at 2,000. The team couldn't clear the queue in a day, so yesterday's email carried into this morning, every morning. And almost none of it was the work they wanted to be doing. Where's my order. Which payment methods do you take. How does this part of the site work. Operational questions, one after another, most needing two or three rounds of back-and-forth before anyone got an answer.

The help center didn't help. It had no search box at all. Customers had to click through categories by hand to find anything, which is a rough ask for the people actually shopping these brands: teens and twentysomethings who type the way they talk.

Here's where it broke down. A young customer wondering when a package shows up doesn't search "delivery lead time." They search "when does it arrive?" The old knowledge base couldn't connect that kind of plain-language question to the right article. So the customer gave up and sent an email. Two thousand times a month.

Why Helpfeel

The company's president flagged Helpfeel first, and the team's reaction was instant. Senior Manager Deputy Oshima put it plainly: "It felt like it addressed exactly what we needed to solve. I felt like we had no choice but to adopt it."

They had a choice to make. Patch the old knowledge base piece by piece while still buried under daily email, or rebuild from the ground up. They chose to rebuild. The whole problem was the gap between how young customers search and how a traditional help center is structured, and Helpfeel's intent-prediction search closes that gap directly: it reads colloquial, half-formed questions and maps them to the answer the customer actually wanted.

What They Did

• Launched Helpfeel in March 2022 with a target of cutting monthly inquiries to under 200 by August 2023, less than one-tenth of peak volume
• Migrated content from the old help center with keyword tuning throughout, guided by monthly Customer Success meetings that turned high-inquiry topics into new articles
• Split long articles into short ones, which matters when 90% of EC customers shop on a phone and won't scroll through a wall of text
• Pinned the top 3 inquiry types (delivery timing, payment methods, shipping options) as "frequently asked questions" right below the search bar, reordering them dynamically by what's spiking, which dropped inquiries immediately
• Redesigned the contact form in parallel, adding required fields so the team gets everything it needs to answer in a single reply with no follow-up, pushing first-contact resolution from 70% to 90%
• Added QR codes to in-store receipts linking straight to the help center, so a customer with a post-purchase question lands on self-service instead of cornering a store associate

Results

B's International hit the target ahead of schedule. Monthly inquiry volume fell from a peak of 2,000 to consistently under 200, a 90% reduction. First-contact resolution climbed from around 70% to 90% once the new contact form was in place.

Now the team has its time back. Ogawa pointed to work that simply wasn't possible before: rebuilding store manuals, and planning store visits to interview staff in person. Oshima described a bigger shift in what the department is even for. The job used to be reactive: answer the email, clear the queue, repeat. The new job is customer success, reading what search and inquiry behavior reveal about what customers need, then handing those findings to product and service teams who can act on them.

One example shows how fast this loop now closes. A limited-edition item went up as a pre-order with a 6-month delivery lead time, and inquiries surged from customers who'd missed the timing on the order screen. Customer Success traced the traffic, surfaced the answer in both the "frequently asked questions" block and the site's top page, and watched the inquiry volume fall in real time.

"Helpfeel changed how I spend my time. It allowed me to take on other work I couldn't previously touch. As self-resolution rates improve, every team member has the opportunity to expand the scope of what they do."

Ogawa, Digital Commerce Division, Customer Success Department

Looking Ahead

The next push is the no-hit rate. The team wants to anticipate even more of the search vocabulary younger customers use, so it's going to the source: surveying store staff, who tend to be the same age as the customers, about the exact words they'd reach for to describe a common problem.

The longer view is to keep moving the department from support toward genuine customer success. The team has set an 80% self-resolution target by the end of February 2024, and plans to put Helpfeel data to work on upsell and on sharing insight across teams. One near-term step: measure whether customers found a given article helpful, which sharpens both the content and the upsell strategy built on top of it.

“Helpfeel changed how I spend my time. It allowed me to take on other work I couldn't previously touch. As self-resolution rates improve, every team member has the opportunity to expand the scope of what they do.”

— Ogawa, Digital Commerce Division, Customer Success Department