7 Tips on Creating an Effective Online FAQ

Numerous businesses around the world are always working on improving their customer support, as customer satisfaction is one of the more important factors affecting the business growth rate. The more support you offer to your customers, the better.

Implementation of a knowledge base is a perfect way of making your online FAQ pages much more effective. Especially when you take into consideration that phone and email support costs can go quite high. Let’s take a look at how you can make effective online FAQ pages by using a knowledge base.

Start off with collecting data

Creating FAQ pages without data can be a waste of time, as you and your staff are practically unaware of the precise problems that your customers might have. To make sure that you are actually creating FAQ pages that are going to be used, you should collect information about the issues your customers are having from the already existing customer support channels. This is going to allow you to create a list of most frequent issues you should begin building your FAQ with.

Use common language

To avoid any complications and make it easy for your customers to go through FAQ pages, it is best to use common, everyday language without any complicated expressions. Of course, keep the text completely formal, but use no words that would require your customers to use a dictionary. If there are product or service-related professional terms, make sure to include tooltips to make it easy for customers to understand.

Standardize content form

To establish an easy workflow for filling the FAQ with a lot of content, it is best to create a form that will make it easy to add new information to your FAQ pages. For example, you can create the form as follows:

• Problem– This part of the text should explain what problem is going to be solved by the following instructions.
• Instructions– Present step-by step instructions to help the customer solve the problem.
• Results– Indicate how the whole process ends, that is, what things should look like once a problem is resolved.

Creating a form like this is going to help you create a lot of content in a short period of time. Additionally, the users are going to become accustomed to your form and they will easily navigate through the FAQ pages.

Provide further instructions

There are situations when the customer cannot resolve their issue solely from the information found on your FAQ pages. To keep him or her satisfied, it is important to add prominent buttons which he or she can use to contact you and solve their problems easily.

This is a great way of acquiring more data about some issues that the FAQ does not solve, and what you could do to enable it to solve those problems as well.

Improve the search

There are amazing FAQ pages out there, however, not all of them are hierarchically ordered, making it harder for users to navigate to find the answer they need. However, with appropriate ordering of elements, it is possible to help customers easily find a solution to their problems.

Additionally, the best solution to go for is to customize the search function to your FAQ pages. One of the things you could do to improve the search functionality is to include keywords that customers are likely to use while searching a topic. You can also integrate Google Analytics with your knowledge base to track keywords being typed in the search box.  Improving the search will help your customers find a solution quickly and improve their overall delight with your service.

Conduct appropriate updates

As the company is growing and moving forward, it is certain that the products and services you are offering are also being upgraded or changed. This implies that it is also necessary to actively update your customer support.

For example, imagine having a software product that is version 1.0 and you create an FAQ page that explains some issues that might come up with it. After that, you release version 2.0 and keep the same FAQ page. The customers would be outraged and unsatisfied.

Scenarios like this show how important it is to have an updated FAQ page that includes all the important information about the latest products or services that you are offering.

Managing this is quite easy, simply update the already existing FAQ page with additional information for a specific version, or include a link that leads to another FAQ page that contains information about the new version of a product. This will make it easier for customers to navigate through FAQ pages and find what they are looking for.

Include videos or images

In many cases, explaining an issue without graphic representations can be quite challenging, especially when you take into account that not all customers are as familiar with the product as you are. To ensure that everyone is going to understand what you are explaining, make sure to include a follow up video or a series of images depicting the step-by-step process the customers should go through. This will make your FAQ pages much more effective, as images and videos are much easier to follow in some scenarios.

If you are looking for a way to build a great FAQ database, relying on a knowledge base is a perfect solution. It is going to offer you easy editing, addition or removal of an obsolete FAQ page. Make sure to follow the above tips, it will make it much easier to make the FAQ creation process run smoothly and be actually useful for your customers. It will positively affect the customer satisfaction rates, and it will also lower the costs of your customer support team.