Call Abandonment Cut to 1% While Serving 60,000 Staff: Bears' Internal Helpdesk Success

Bears Co., Ltd.

Home Services·1,001+ employees·Internal Helpdesk

Call Abandonment Cut to 1% While Serving 60,000 Staff: Bears' Internal Helpdesk Success

At a glance

• Call abandonment rate reduced to 1% monthly average
• Call-in rate dropped from 8.95% to 7.6%, continuing to decline
• 95.3% of staff aware of the FAQ; 73.3% have used it
• Regional call center capacity freed to absorb overflow, no headcount added despite growing service volume

The Challenge

Bears Co., Ltd. is a home services company offering cleaning, housekeeping, childcare, and elderly care support, handling over 550,000 service sessions per year. These services are delivered by 60,000 directly employed housekeeping staff known as "Bears Ladies."

The Staff Support Team was receiving over 300 inquiries per day: more than 100 phone calls and nearly 200 emails. Bears Ladies span a wide age range, with the core group in their 50s and some active members in their 80s. Inquiries varied enormously in urgency, from "I'm feeling ill and need to cancel tomorrow's service" to "I'd like to discuss next month's schedule." Simply sorting and prioritizing this volume created a significant workload on its own.

Many inquiries had fairly standard answers, but the team struggled to enable self-service. They tried adding headcount, introducing a basic FAQ within the Bears Ladies app, and even launching a live staffed chat function. The chat failed: with only 3 to 4 staff members managing it simultaneously, response times were too slow, and Bears Ladies complained. As call volumes increased, phone lines became harder to get through.

Why Helpfeel

Knowing that many Bears Ladies, who skew older in age, were less comfortable with smartphone operations, the team understood that the ease and immediacy of a phone call would remain appealing. But phone capacity has a hard ceiling.

Helpfeel's intent-prediction search stood out. Even with vague or imprecise input, the system surfaces relevant answers, making it well-suited to users who might struggle to formulate the "right" search keyword. The team felt this was the kind of tool that Bears Ladies would find usable and that would genuinely lead to self-resolution.

What They Did

• Staff profile articles: During the early post-launch period, uptake among Bears Ladies was slower than hoped, a common resistance to new digital tools in this demographic. In response, the team began publishing staff profile articles within the FAQ, introducing the internal staff members who interact frequently with Bears Ladies. These articles share each person's character, hire date, birthday, blood type, hometown, career history, reason for joining, and a personal message to the Bears Ladies. Some profiles include photos. The content has since been used to run a "Staff General Election" in which Bears Ladies vote for their favorite colleagues. The goal was to build familiarity and warmth toward the people behind the company, using that emotional connection as a gateway to Helpfeel engagement. In practice, the staff profile articles frequently rank among the most-viewed content on the FAQ.

• Monthly customer success meetings: With such a large volume of inquiries, detailed keyword-level analysis is extremely time-consuming. The call center team often operates until around 9:00 p.m., making it nearly impossible to conduct thorough data analysis alongside day-to-day responsibilities. Helpfeel's customer success team provides analysis and recommendations at monthly standing meetings, a significant source of operational support the team describes as indispensable.

• AI draft generation: The team is currently experimenting with Helpfeel's FAQ draft generation feature (which uses ChatGPT to create FAQ content from brief notes or keywords), aiming to further improve content creation efficiency.

Results

The call abandonment rate, calls that disconnect before reaching a staff member, has not yet reached zero, but after Helpfeel's introduction it dropped to a monthly average of approximately 1%. As more Bears Ladies resolve their questions through the FAQ, the call-in rate (calls relative to service volume) decreased from 8.95% in October 2022 (the month of Helpfeel's launch) to 7.6%, 7.7% at the time of the interview, and continues to decline gradually.

A notable operational development: the call centers in Tokyo, Saitama, Chiba, and Kanagawa have seen enough reduction in incoming volume that freed capacity is now being used to absorb inquiries from the Kansai-region call center as well. Despite an increase in total service volume year-over-year, the call center headcount has not been expanded, a result the team directly attributes to Helpfeel.

An internal survey (N=244) found that 95.3% of Bears Ladies are aware of the FAQ, and 73.3% have used it. Analysis of inquiry topics showed no heavy concentration in any single category, the FAQ is being used broadly across a wide variety of subjects.

Selected comments from the internal survey:

• "When I type a keyword I'm curious about, several related questions come up. It's very easy to understand."
• "It's easy to ask questions, and it's handy even when I have a question at a customer's home. Very easy to use."
• "Just typing one character brings up related articles. Very user-friendly."

"The vision is for Helpfeel to become the 'textbook' for Bears Ladies. Ideally, new joiners would be told during onboarding: 'just look it up on Helpfeel,' and that alone would be enough to get them through most situations."

Tsukada, Staff Support Team, Bears Co., Ltd.

Looking Ahead

With usage among Bears Ladies now growing, the next goal is to raise the self-resolution rate further. As inquiry data continues to accumulate, the team wants to analyze it deeply and use those insights to create a more stable, supportive working environment for Bears Ladies, and to proactively address needs before they turn into inquiries.

Bears adopted Helpfeel from the perspective of improving employee satisfaction (ES). As labor shortages become an increasingly serious social challenge, ES will only grow in importance. The company particularly recommends Helpfeel to businesses in service industries and other sectors where securing and retaining human talent is critical.

“The vision is for Helpfeel to become the 'textbook' for Bears Ladies. Ideally, new joiners would be told during onboarding: 'just look it up on Helpfeel,' and that alone would be enough to get them through most situations.”

— Tsukada, Staff Support Team, Bears Co., Ltd.