In today’s world of the internet, having an FAQ page is a necessary tool for almost for any business or organization. But, have you ever had the experience of scrolling through an unhelpful FAQ page, giving up, and looking for the answer somewhere else? It’s not an ideal experience when one needs help and is already frustrated. How do you make sure that your FAQ section is actually doing it’s job? Let’s break down some tips to help you have a helpful FAQ page.
- Use service data to find out what questions they are asking
- Design your FAQ page in an organized fashion
- Keep it simple
- Make it easy to use
Organization Is An Invaluable Skill
If you are going to run a business efficiently, you need someone on your team who can compartmentalize things into sections that can be tackled. You have to be able to spend your resources wisely. You don’t want your support team spending vast amounts of time answering questions that three sentences on a web page could have easily solved. You also don’t want to be directing your clients to a poorly designed answer center where they wont find the solution they need.
First and foremost, obviously any company should be centered around the customer’s needs. If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business, so try not to take your life blood for granted. To create a helpful FAQ page, you need at the very least a basic understanding of your customers potential pains. You should be able to use service data to identify the questions your customers have, and create a useful FAQ page.
Get Visual
A large percentage of people consider themselves visual learners. Utilize this when designing your page, to make it easy to navigate, and easy to understand. See if you can use pictures or videos to display whatever it is you need to portray on your page. Give them something to keep them awake besides a bunch of text. Take cues from FAQ pages that actually work well.
Getting It Together
This may take some time, but putting in the work is going to be worth it. It’s going to pay off to keep up with your analytic feedback from such pages, and have genuine conversations with customers. You will waste much less time in the long run if you can center an FAQ page around the questions your customers actually ask, as opposed to the ones you think you should answer. It may seem like a simple concept, but you would be surprised how many companies actually do this wrong. Poorly designed FAQ pages can be confusing, and may even confuse your analytic system. Customers could get distracted and click on a link or question that is not helpful to their particular situation, and illegitimate clicks are only going to confuse your page further. So, how do you lay out your FAQ page in a concise, clear, and helpful manner?
- Do your research, make sure they are actually questions that are most commonly asked by your customers. You also need to keep this well updated.
- Organize questions by category.
- Write the questions from the customer’s perspective, using the language that they would use. It’s about them, remember?
- Less is more. Make it as simple and easy to navigate as possible. Don’t add anything unnecessary.
- Brand tone. This is still part of your online presence, make sure customers can tell who they are with and are comfortable.
- Make sure FAQ page is easily accessible.
- Search bar. If your FAQ page is big enough for a search bar, people love to be able to just type their question in, as this will save them time. It should search for answers on the FAQ page. Not the whole web site.
- Also keep in mind that people will scan quickly down the page, as they don’t need to read all of it. So make the subject topic bold enough to pop out at them.
Conclusion
Don’t overload your page, or make it unnecessarily complicated.
Make your FAQ page easy to find.
Do routine maintenance and keep your page updated. Doing manual maintenance and editing pays off. This will save your team a lot of time in the long run. This way your support team won’t be wasting time, and will be able to focus on other work, or customers that have more pressing matters.
Search bars are good. People like search bars.
Make it easy. Easy to read. Easy to get answer.
Help your clients. Don’t let your FAQ page be the digital version of a rude employee. Represent what you stand for, and provide them the service they deserve by keeping it simple, and putting in the work.
