How we automated FAQ responses at Grab

Summary

Internal engineering on-call engineers at Grab spent substantial working hours handling repetitive questions in Slack channels, such as how-to inquiries and access permission requests. To resolve this without building an in-house tool, the team conducted an anonymized vendor comparison and selected OneBar through an employee voting process and a phased proof-of-concept. Initial rollouts were restricted by contract to 20 channels, leading the team to prioritize deployment based on Slack message volume and member counts. Populating the knowledge base required roughly a quarter of consistent updates alongside tech talks, while a targeted crowdsourcing campaign among new onboarders expanded the glossary and grew usage to approximately 3,000 users.

Context

On-call engineers at Grab spent significant time in Slack channels answering repetitive queries that were already documented, hindering productivity and operational work.

Approach / What changed

Evaluated vendors via blind employee voting, conducted a three-phase proof-of-concept with OneBar, prioritized 20 high-traffic Slack channels using analytics, and crowdsourced knowledge base entries and acronym glossaries through onboarder campaigns.

Takeaways

• Anonymizing vendor names and highlighting core feature differences prevented user bias toward familiar brands during the selection process.
• A 20-channel contract constraint was addressed by using Slack analytics to prioritize channels with the highest monthly message volume and member counts.
• Achieving accurate automated responses required about one quarter of consistent knowledge base feeding supported by targeted onboarding campaigns.

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