96% Fewer Phone Inquiries: How Odakyu Travel Scaled Support During a Full Digital Transformation

Odakyu Electric Railway Co., Ltd.

Travel & Transportation·1,001+ employees·Customer Support

96% Fewer Phone Inquiries: How Odakyu Travel Scaled Support During a Full Digital Transformation

At a glance

• Phone inquiries cut 96% after Helpfeel launch
• 3,600+ FAQ sessions per month, demonstrating active customer self-service
• Phone lines reduced from 4 to 2, staff on phone duty from 4 to 3

The Challenge

Odakyu Electric Railway, known for its iconic "Romance Car" limited express trains to Hakone and Enoshima, undertook a complete digital transformation of its travel business in 2021. The company closed all roughly 20 in-person retail branches and shifted to a fully online direct-sales model specializing in destinations along the Odakyu Line.

This fundamental change eliminated every traditional customer touchpoint: paper ticket handovers, face-to-face consultations, and in-person customer service all disappeared. The booking systems and staffing were restructured for online-native operations. For support, the direction was clear: enrich web-based information and minimize phone and email contacts as much as possible.

One critical challenge was explaining digital ticket handling for multi-person reservations. Products like Romance Car tickets and the Hakone Free Pass now use digital tickets that must be obtained and presented from each individual traveler's own smartphone. A group cannot have one person obtain all tickets, each traveler must individually complete the required steps. Explaining this clearly online, for first-time users unfamiliar with the system, became a primary FAQ design goal.

Why Helpfeel

The team evaluated multiple FAQ solutions capable of automatic search-based answer surfacing (replacing the old static sequential Q&A format). Helpfeel was selected because its combination of features offered the best user experience, particularly the ability to prominently display the most common questions without requiring a user to type anything.

The fact that major operators in the passenger transport and travel industry had already adopted Helpfeel, allowing the team to directly experience its search capabilities in a live environment, was also a significant factor in the decision.

What They Did

• Built fresh Q&A content from experience. Staff members with extensive face-to-face and telephone customer service experience independently listed likely inquiry topics. Overlapping items were consolidated into well-defined questions, and corresponding answers were written.

• Featured high-frequency questions prominently. Questions such as "Can I change my Romance Car departure time on the day of travel?" were configured for prominent top-of-page display, allowing customers to access answers with a single click without needing to type anything.

• Made key search terms easy to browse. Frequently searched keywords such as "Romance Car," "change," and "cancel" were prominently featured, linking users to a list of related questions they could browse to find their answer.

• Bridged complex processes with supplementary guides. For digital ticket multi-person reservations, the FAQ provides a high-level explanation and links to a detailed PDF guide with step-by-step instructions, including how the group representative can share individual activation URLs with companions via messaging apps.

• Tuned discoverability with ongoing support. Given that inquiry topics were relatively well-defined from the outset (travel reservations around a specific set of products and destinations), ongoing Helpfeel support focused particularly on improving discoverability from high-frequency search terms, including tagging and display-ranking adjustments for keywords like "suspension/cancellation due to service disruption," "cancellation," and "change."

Results

Phone inquiries decreased by approximately 96% following Helpfeel's introduction. Project Manager Hideyuki Nakamura acknowledges that other factors contributed (the phone number was removed from the website and travel demand patterns shifted), so a direct causal attribution is not straightforward. However, in the same period, Helpfeel FAQ sessions reached over 3,600 per month, providing strong evidence that the FAQ is absorbing contacts that would otherwise have become phone calls.

Based on these results, the team reduced its telephone lines from 4 to 2, and the number of staff on phone duty rotation was reduced from 4 people to 3 (excluding Nakamura himself).

"User behavior analysis from Helpfeel's support sessions reveals that a substantial proportion of FAQ visitors are reading articles thoroughly and resolving their questions before any contact with support staff. Coming from a background in face-to-face and telephone service, this level of FAQ engagement exceeded my own expectations by a significant margin."

Hideyuki Nakamura, Project Manager, Tourism Business Development Department

Looking Ahead

Nakamura plans to distribute FAQ creation and maintenance responsibilities more broadly within the team, reducing reliance on external support and allowing the content to be updated more frequently. He wants the FAQ to eventually cover explanations that currently reside in other website content areas, making the FAQ a comprehensive, self-contained resource.

A notable initiative already underway is the "Odakyu Travel New Booking System: Smartphone Reservation Class," a daily, reservation-based in-person session held at the Odakyu Travel Center in Shinjuku where customers can bring their own smartphones and receive hands-on guidance for making reservations. Nakamura intends to make the FAQ an effective extension of this support by enabling it to guide senior users toward the smartphone class and related resources, bridging the gap between online self-service and personal assistance.

“User behavior analysis from Helpfeel's support sessions reveals that a substantial proportion of FAQ visitors are reading articles thoroughly and resolving their questions before any contact with support staff. Coming from a background in face-to-face and telephone service, this level of FAQ engagement exceeded my own expectations by a significant margin.”

— Hideyuki Nakamura, Project Manager, Tourism Business Development Department