# Inquiry Rate Below 1% Despite 30% Growth: How Raccoon Financial Scaled Support with Search-First Self-Service - Inquiry rate cut 20%, from ~1.1% to ~0.9% - Member base grew 30% after launch - Inquiry rate stayed below 1% through rapid growth ## The Challenge Raccoon Financial operates Paid, a B2B payment service that handles invoicing, collections, and payment guarantees for over 4,500 companies. The entire application process is online, and both seller companies and their buyer trading partners have dedicated inquiry channels. Despite having a FAQ site, the team was fielding 2,500 to 3,000 inquiries per month. Inquiry volume grew in direct proportion to the member base, placing increasing strain on operators. The frustrating pattern: simple questions asked repeatedly, questions already answered in the FAQ that customers could easily resolve on their own if they had found the right answer. The root causes were clear. The FAQ site had low awareness, poor navigation pathways, and was genuinely difficult to use. Paper invoices listed a phone number as the contact channel, making it hard to guide customers from physical to digital. The most common question, "When will my invoice be issued?", stemmed from customers not understanding Paid's monthly billing cycle. When Hiroaki Tanaka, Business Development in the Paid Promotion Division, took responsibility for the FAQ in summer 2018, he discovered some content hadn't been updated since October 2016, nearly two years prior. Tanaka revamped the customer-facing portal to surface key information immediately upon login, but inquiry volume didn't change dramatically. The team needed to overhaul the FAQ itself. ## Why Helpfeel A colleague introduced Helpfeel to Tanaka at the end of 2021, just as he was gathering materials from other FAQ vendors. High build costs and ongoing running costs from those vendors had been obstacles. The internal discussion moved quickly, narrowing to a simple "do we adopt Helpfeel or not?" The decision was made to proceed. The core motivation was straightforward: Tanaka wanted more customers to actually use the FAQ site. If customers could resolve their own questions, inquiry volume would decrease and customer satisfaction would rise. That positive cycle was what the team was trying to create. ## What They Did - **Eliminated no-hit search results.** The Helpfeel Customer Success team extracted no-hit keywords and proposed content to address each gap, surfacing related search terms so customers' search needs could be met even when their phrasing wasn't exact. - **Emphasized search as the resolution path.** Tanaka observed from his operator experience that customers asking questions often "don't know what they don't know." The act of searching, pausing to ask "why don't I understand this? what exactly don't I understand?", is itself necessary for arriving at genuine resolution. - **Made the bold decision to hide FAQ categories entirely.** Initially, category navigation was displayed alongside search to accommodate the full spectrum of digital literacy across Paid's member base. But this conflicted with the core purpose of introducing Helpfeel: to drive resolution through search. A comment from Tanaka's manager dissolved all remaining doubt: "Have you ever seen someone get stuck trying to use Google search?" Google's homepage is nothing but the logo and a search box, and it functions as the universal search platform. The fact that Paid maintained robust phone support for customers who needed it allowed the team to feel comfortable with a search-first approach. - **Promoted the FAQ URL proactively.** The team began including the Helpfeel FAQ URL on paper invoices sent to members, bridging the physical-to-digital gap. ## Results The inquiry rate dropped from approximately 1.1% to approximately 0.9%, a roughly 20% reduction. Over the same period, the member base grew approximately 30%. The inquiry rate was held below 1% despite that growth. The nature of incoming inquiries shifted meaningfully. Simple questions, the kind easily answered by checking the FAQ, gradually declined. This reduced the workload on operators. The previous FAQ had inconsistent terminology and only matched exact-keyword searches. If a customer searched using a slight variation in phrasing or script, the search would return no results. The site was genuinely difficult to use, and the team lacked the confidence to actively promote it to customers. After introducing Helpfeel, the improved search capability made it possible to center customer support around the FAQ site. The customer support team described the change as "the shock of going from a feature phone to a smartphone." The UI and UX improvement was that dramatic. Raccoon Commerce, Inc., a group company that observed Raccoon Financial's success, also decided to adopt Helpfeel. Success in one entity spread organically to another within the group. The ongoing support from the Helpfeel Customer Success team, covering detailed adjustments and aspects the internal team doesn't have bandwidth to address in daily operations, was highly valued. ## Looking Ahead The goal going forward is to create an experience where customers feel no friction at all when using Paid. When reviewing inquiries in depth, patterns emerge: "if this is confusing, that probably is too." The aspiration is to have the FAQ site proactively address those connected follow-on questions, so that resolution happens entirely within the FAQ without needing to reach out. Tanaka noted a desire not to be bound purely by numeric metrics. Customer satisfaction surveys will always have a gap from reality, and most customers who have a positive experience with the FAQ will never say so explicitly. What he'd truly like is a tool that captures how customers feel while actually using the FAQ site. The Helpfeel Customer Success team has been doing a good job of picking up on those kinds of needs and blind spots that get missed in the rush of daily operations, and he hopes to continue that partnership in pursuit of genuine customer satisfaction.