SEO-led strategy to reduce support tickets for Shell Global
Digital content is the first and often the last point of contact for customers in a state of urgency. A global SEO strategy produces many benefits for both customers and support agents.
Client: Shell Global 2023
Site: https://support.shell.de/hc/de
Shell's customer support pages had an opportunity to deflect common FAQ queries from phone lines. Hundreds of thousands of support tickets were flooding the agent phone lines, but the majority were simple FAQs that delayed agents from resolving complex, high-impact cases. It was a pattern across multiple markets.
The scope of work required data analysis, keyword research, content auditing, client team upskilling and performance benchmarking. The global strategy was used across three different markets from Europe to Asia.
After strategy and planning sign-offs, the execution was done in short turnarounds depending on each local market team's response time to specified milestones. Within roughly three-month timeframes, the post-implementation reports showed measurable reductions in support tickets and gains in organic traffic.
The post-90 day results were a reduction in the average number of customer support centre self-serve tickets by 43%. Organic traffic to support pages grew by 8,848%+ over 90 days.
It meant thousands of customer support agent calls were reduced and online support page traffic went from inconsistent <100 monthly visitors to 2.2k+ monthly visits. Early signs suggest organic traffic may continue to grow, alongside improvements to customer experience and site visibility.
The ticket-deflection project sat inside a wider global SEO programme at Shell. The support-page work was one strand. The broader work I supported included the SEO planning and the strategy playbook the local market teams worked from.
The transformation strand replaced fragmented regional SEO with one operating model. Markets had been running separate playbooks for different audiences, which duplicated effort and left non-brand demand untapped. The work split brand from non-brand search so regions could prioritise where new customers actually start. Shared KPIs put every market on the same basis, with monthly reporting moved into Adobe Analytics so leadership could act on it. I supported the benchmarking and the reporting design, along with the technical SEO standards the markets adopted.
Two GenAI tools came out of the programme. I helped develop one for metadata generation, producing titles and descriptions at the scale the market rollout needed. I also delivered a second that generated image alt text, so accessibility and image search were not left as a manual backlog. Both fed the content pipeline rather than sitting as side experiments.
The programme was delivered at iCrossing, the agency on Shell's global search. iCrossing's published account of the support work reports organic traffic up 32,226% across the wider rollout and a 43% drop in tickets. A separate global framework unified 87 markets and grew non-brand clicks by 24%. The 90-day figures above are from the support.shell.de market specifically.
