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.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Anonymizing vendor names and highlighting core feature differences prevented user bias toward familiar brands during the selection process.

2. 2

   A 20-channel contract constraint was addressed by using Slack analytics to prioritize channels with the highest monthly message volume and member counts.

3. 3

   Achieving accurate automated responses required about one quarter of consistent knowledge base feeding supported by targeted onboarding campaigns.