The Social Industry & Finance Group of Marubeni Corporation used to receive about 100 IT-related internal inquiries per month, which were handled by the support center or dedicated in-house resident staff. More than 60% of the inquiries are frequently asked questions, and automating the answers to these questions alone would save the group 540 man-hours of work per year, according to the group's calculations.

In 2021, the group introduced a third-party product, but switched to HUE Chatbot because of the man-hours required to maintain the FAQs. The group decided to adopt the service because it was easy to improve the FAQs after using the trial service. The company also appreciated the fact that the free-word (free input) search can quickly lead to an answer, making communication with the inquirer more efficient.

The AI-type chatbot improves the accuracy of its answers by learning AI based on usage data. Therefore, we will first aim to increase the usage rate within the group and improve the accuracy of answers based on the accumulated usage data. In addition, since the system can be flexibly configured to grant administrator privileges, we plan to consider expanding the system not only to IT-related inquiries, but also to other back-office related internal inquiries in the future.

The "HUE Chatbot" adopted this time has the following features:

(1) The HUE Chatbot is a powerful tool for customer support. The largest registered vocabulary in Japan, even for ambiguous questions
Developed by the Works Tokushima Artificial Intelligence NLP Laboratory, which specializes in natural language processing (NLP) technology essential for AI chatbots Largest in Japan with 2.9 million words (as of May 2022), the largest natural language processing dictionary in Japan. There is no need to register a large dictionary, and the number of FAQs to be prepared can be reduced. It also accurately determines the unique distortions of the Japanese language and handles ambiguous questions.

②Easy operation with drag & drop, no programming required
The management screen is designed to be easy to use, with questions and answers displayed in a tree-like format, and candidate answers can be adjusted by drag-and-drop. There is also a function to directly adjust answer candidates based on the user's answer history, making it easy to make improvements.

③Flexible administrator authority settings for easy expansion of use to other departments
Administrator privileges can be set in detail, making it possible to expand the use of chatbots to other departments. For example, if a chatbot is to be introduced for general internal inquiries, multiple departments such as the IT, General Affairs, and Accounting departments are expected to be involved.

We are actively adding functions in response to customer feedback, and have recently added "multilingual support," "Teams integration," and "LINE and LINE WORKS integration. We are also planning to add a function that allows chatbots to answer questions even without FAQs (text search function), and we will continue to enhance various useful functions to increase the convenience of inquirers and administrators.

Product website: https://www.worksap.co.jp/saas/chatbot/