Peak Season Phone Surge Cut to One-Eighth: Sompo Himawari Life Insurance Makes FAQ the Core of Non-Voice Support

SOMPO Himawari Life Insurance Co., Ltd.

Insurance·1,001+ employees·Customer Support

Peak Season Phone Surge Cut to One-Eighth: Sompo Himawari Life Insurance Makes FAQ the Core of Non-Voice Support

At a glance

• Peak season phone surge reduced to 1/8 of prior year (16% → 2%)
• 540+ Q&A items managed with data-driven improvement cycles
• 100% satisfaction with Helpfeel support structure
• FAQ positioned as the core of non-voice customer service strategy

The Challenge

SOMPO Himawari Life Insurance manages approximately 4.7 million insurance policies. Like many companies facing shifting communication preferences and labor shortages, they were pursuing a "non-voice" strategy to shift customer service away from phone calls. They recognized FAQ as the core of this approach, but lacked the infrastructure to make it work.

Despite having FAQ operations staff working on the same floor as the call center, positioned to quickly reflect the latest phone inquiry trends into content, improvements were ad hoc and driven by individual judgment rather than data. The team had no established system for continuously improving the FAQ based on metrics, and wasn't collecting sufficient data to form the foundation for improvement.

The vision was clear: achieve stress-free self-resolution by minimizing user input effort and providing the right information proactively. Customers looking for the same information might search using different terms like "insurance premium" versus "contribution amount," and anyone, including those unfamiliar with insurance terminology, needed to easily reach the correct answer regardless of how they phrased it. The team concluded they needed a new FAQ tool with rich measurable indicators and strong support.

Why Helpfeel

The decision came down to usability for policyholders and features that would actually improve self-resolution rates.

Key deciding factors were real-time access to metrics indicating whether customers were finding the FAQ after searching (exit rate after search) and whether they were having to search repeatedly (re-search rate), high search capability that returned results even for partial keyword matches and synonyms, and the availability of ongoing support to maintain a consistent improvement cycle after implementation.

FAQ content accumulates over time, requiring not only updates to reflect the latest information but also constant verification of whether it's keeping pace with evolving search needs. At the company, FAQ managers rotate every few years due to job rotation policies. To ensure that improvement efforts would continue regardless of who was in the role, they needed to combine the knowledge of customer service veterans with regular data tracking and data-driven technical analysis and proposals. Helpfeel could provide all of this together in one package.

What They Did

• Revamped the policyholder-facing FAQ with approximately 540 Q&A items, combining content revised from the previous system with new additions
• Established FAQ operations shared among seven members of the Planning Group plus several staff from other departments
• Continuously refined FAQ design and features based on proposals from Helpfeel and requests from FAQ creators
• Regularly adjusted "frequently viewed articles" and "frequently searched terms" sections at the top of the FAQ page based on recent access data, actual inquiry data, and mailing schedules
• Proactively surfaced topics that policyholders were likely to ask about to encourage smoother self-resolution
• Conducted monthly article reviews as a standard agenda item at meetings with the Helpfeel team, grounded in actual performance data

Results

Every year, when SOMPO Himawari sends out "Policy Content Notices" to policyholders so they can confirm coverage details, July sees a sharp spike in phone inquiries compared to the previous month. The prior year saw a 16% increase in call volume in July compared to June. The year after implementing Helpfeel, a similar increase of approximately 20% was anticipated, but the actual increase was only 2%.

The peak season phone increase rate was reduced to one-eighth of what it had been the previous year.

While the team doesn't track every single call's path prior to contact, the proportion of calls arriving via digital channels such as the website is known to remain relatively constant. Furthermore, the total number of policyholders who accessed the FAQ after receiving the mailed notice was approximately the same as the prior year. The team concluded that the main driver of the phone call reduction was customers reaching the answers they needed through improved FAQ search capability, resulting in higher self-resolution rates.

By being an early adopter of Helpfeel's keyword and tap-based intent-prediction search, the company's FAQ is now positioned as offering industry-leading search capability. Category-based list navigation FAQs, where users search manually through organized lists, remain the industry norm across life insurance company websites.

Internal FAQ operations have also been dramatically strengthened. Article reviews that previously occurred perhaps once a year at each individual's discretion are now conducted monthly as a standard agenda item, grounded in actual performance data. When Helpfeel proposed countermeasures for FAQ pages with high exit rates, the improvements became visible the following month, a fast improvement cycle that was exactly what the team had hoped for.

"Being able to suppress phone inquiries that would otherwise have come in is equivalent to having handled those calls. The fact that the peak season phone increase rate was reduced to one-eighth of what it had been the previous year was an enormous impact for the team."

Takeshi Someya, Deputy General Manager & Group Leader, Planning Group, Contact Service Division

Looking Ahead

With Helpfeel, the company has finally been able to invest properly in FAQs, which had always been recognized as critical to non-voice goals but hadn't received sufficient attention. The plan going forward is to combine the FAQ with new initiatives to further accelerate the shift to digital channels, targeting a "non-voice rate" (the share of total customer contacts handled through channels other than phone, including chat and LINE) rising from the current approximately 40% to a sustained level above 50%.

In the first year of Helpfeel, addressing the FAQ's newly visible weaknesses systematically produced broadly expected results. In year two, the goal is to move to a higher level, making more sophisticated decisions about what can be learned from user behavior in Helpfeel and what actions those insights suggest.

The company is currently promoting adoption of "My Link Cross," a registered web service enabling policyholders to confirm contract details and perform various procedures online, with the goals of strengthening relationships with policyholders, enabling stress-free procedures, and improving the non-voice rate. As part of this, the company plans to use the FAQ to encourage registration for the service and support users as they navigate it.

The team plans to continue using insights from call center interactions to refine FAQ content toward better self-resolution, working side by side with Helpfeel and verifying through performance data what content best enables smooth self-resolution.

“Being able to suppress phone inquiries that would otherwise have come in is equivalent to having handled those calls. The fact that the peak season phone increase rate was reduced to one-eighth of what it had been the previous year was an enormous impact for the team.”

— Takeshi Someya, Deputy General Manager & Group Leader, Planning Group, Contact Service Division