90%+ Search Success Rate: How Aderans Turned FAQ Into a Psychological Safe Space

Aderans Co., Ltd.

Retail / Consumer Wellness·1,001+ employees·Customer Support

90%+ Search Success Rate: How Aderans Turned FAQ Into a Psychological Safe Space

At a glance

• No-hit rate reduced to below 10%, clearing initial KPI
• Routine inquiries decreased significantly, freeing capacity for complex consultations
• Chatbot discontinued entirely, all effort redirected to FAQ operations
• Search insights now feed LINE campaigns and marketing content creation

The Challenge

Aderans' Web Service Center existed to answer customer questions and help people feel comfortable enough to book in-store counseling. But routine inquiries about store locations and parking consumed the team's capacity, leaving little room for deeper consultations. A chatbot had been installed and rebuilt three times, each iteration requiring painful manual scenario mapping with no vendor support and no meaningful improvement.

The deeper challenge was psychological. Many customers were too anxious to make contact at all. They worried about discussing hair loss topics on the phone, feared email contact would expose their address or invite sales pressure, and hesitated to ask about pricing in case they felt obligated to buy. For this segment, an FAQ allowing anonymous, frictionless self-service was not a convenience feature. It was the only viable touchpoint.

The existing FAQ had high bounce rates. The team's energy was being consumed by system maintenance rather than customer-facing improvement.

Why Helpfeel

The company's president surfaced Helpfeel as a potential solution. The team saw it directly addressed their pain points:

No scenario scripting required, in sharp contrast to the chatbot experience that had consumed months of effort across three rebuilds.

Strong search functionality that could surface answers even from vague or colloquial queries, meeting customers where they actually were.

Ongoing Customer Success support, seen as the most critical differentiating factor after years of struggling to improve without guidance.

From inquiry to live operation took approximately 2 months, far faster than the team had expected based on prior system implementations.

What They Did

• Shared all existing FAQ and chatbot content with Helpfeel's Customer Success team at launch, who organized and structured it into usable articles
• Built comprehensive foundational content first, after learning that conversion-focused articles failed when fundamental questions remained unanswered
• Linked to relevant FAQ articles when responding to email inquiries, simultaneously resolving the immediate question and making customers aware the FAQ exists for future use
• Used FAQ articles with diagrams and screenshots to answer complex questions the email system couldn't support with image attachments (e.g., cooling-off process illustrated with figures)
• Analyzed Helpfeel search data and discovered customers searched for hair growth topics far more frequently than product topics, revealing a content gap that would never have been identified otherwise
• Extracted high-frequency search keywords and shared them with the advertising department to create related content for distribution via LINE
• Linked campaign emails to dedicated FAQ articles containing campaign details, allowing customers to access further information in a self-service format

Results

No-hit rate fell to below 10%, clearing the initial target KPI. Routine, low-complexity inquiries decreased significantly. Incoming contacts now more likely involve individual circumstances that genuinely require human handling or post-purchase consultations, indicating that basic information is being successfully delivered through the FAQ.

Bounce rate on FAQ articles improved through data-driven content improvements in collaboration with Customer Success. The chatbot, which had been maintained in parallel, was discontinued entirely, with all effort redirected to FAQ operations.

Marketing use of FAQ data expanded: search log keywords now feed into content creation for LINE distribution campaigns. Customer Success support enables improvements that would not be identified internally, including content gap analysis and article-level optimization.

"We want to use the FAQ to gently support customers' 'first step,' the moment they finally decide to reach out. Helpfeel gives us the ability to be there for them whenever they're ready, in a way that respects their pace and privacy."

Manami Yoshimura, Web Service Center

Looking Ahead

The team's philosophy is that anxiety stems from unanswered questions. For Aderans' customers, many dealing with sensitive personal concerns around hair loss, the psychological barrier to reaching out is real. Some customers contact the company once, then reconnect 5 or 10 years later before finally deciding to visit a store. For these customers, having access to reassuring, comprehensive information on their own terms, without any pressure, is what makes the eventual decision to seek counseling possible.

The FAQ is not framed as a tool for reducing operational costs, but as a way to gently lower the psychological threshold for a population of customers who need time, information, and privacy before they are ready to take the next step.

Future plans include continuing to expand article coverage, reducing bounce rates on underperforming articles, extending FAQ data to inform more campaigns and content channels, and exploring broader applications for Helpfeel data across other parts of the business.

“We want to use the FAQ to gently support customers' 'first step,' the moment they finally decide to reach out. Helpfeel gives us the ability to be there for them whenever they're ready, in a way that respects their pace and privacy.”

— Manami Yoshimura, Web Service Center