Last Updated on September 1, 2023 by David
How to build a better FAQ experience for your customers.
No one will tell you how important an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) or KB (Knowledge Base) is when you’re just starting off in eCommerce. They will, however, tell you how important product photography is, how important your store design is, and how important it is to get shipping right. In fact, if you google along the lines of “FAQ usage statistics”, you won’t find much information. But if you google for the benefits of an FAQ page, you’ll find lots of reasons for why you’ll want one. Take this one for example, created by our integration partner, Shopify. In short, an FAQ:
- Helps minimize confusion and purchasing hesitations around common concerns and issues.
- Helps take some of the burden away from your customer service team members so they can focus on one-off questions or urgent issues. FAQs are supposed to answer repetitive questions.
- Helps with getting your content indexed by search engines and can help with search rankings. Well-composed articles will help with site discovery and even facilitate in generating new traffic.
- Demonstrates core business standards and expectations among customers. It tells customers that their purchase is backed up by your competence in handling the transaction.
But how else can an FAQ be beneficial to your business? Can it help make customer service better beyond what it already does? Can it make your team smarter? Can it drive additional value to your business beyond just helping customers? Let’s dive in.
The Standard FAQ
Here’s what a standard FAQ looks like:
And while we love Cards Against Humanity, their “dumb questions” repository leaves a lot to be desired for. Here are the issues:
- Plain text content with no support for rich content like images or videos
- No easy way to search for specific things (and there are lots)
- Can’t easily find other relevant articles or topics
- The entire FAQ can only be accessed from one URL
- If you want to share a specific article with a friend, you won’t have an article-specific URL to share
- The organization and navigation is awkward because everything is in one place and not well organized
So while the Cards Against Humanity FAQ satisfies all of the benefits of having an FAQ, it doesn’t add anything extra.
The Better FAQ For Customers
Here’s another take on an FAQ built on top of our customer service platform, Re:amaze. As you can see, it’s immediately more inviting for someone looking for answers. Beyond looks however, this FAQ offers several other advantages of a standard FAQ.
Rich Content
Images and videos in your FAQ or KB is just as important as product photography for your website and store. In the standard FAQ, having images or videos would throw off the entire user interface because it simply does not play well with how content is displayed. This Re:amaze-powered FAQ shows off each individual article separately, giving you creative freedom to craft highly engaging pieces accompanied for hyperlinks, colors, images, videos, and much more.
Powerful Search
There’s no reason why searching for something quickly should be so hard. Sure, someone can easily use command + f or ctrl + f to search on a modern browser but is that really the most elegant solution?
This FAQ beats out the standard FAQ by miles by having contextual search, expanded search, keyword search, and also related search. As an added bonus, you even get previews and topics for the articles that match a specific search query.
Relevant and Suggested Articles
More often than not, an article on a specific frequently asked question is but a piece to a bigger puzzle. Organizational and content SEO advantages aside, this FAQ betters the standard FAQ with superior article handling and suggesting other articles to read through keyword relevance and metadata tags. Remember, if your customers are already reading your FAQ, there’s no reason to prevent them from reading about your other pieces of content!
Easy Sharing
A good FAQ should be great for sharing content especially when it’s designed to show off awesome content and expert knowledge. The better FAQ outsmarts the standard FAQ by having individual article URLs.
Organized By Topics and Articles
Articles organized by topics is the most natural way for writing content. Think about it. Textbooks are organized topics. Manuals are as well. And so are books of all types. Your FAQ is essentially your textbook and your instruction manual.
A Better FAQ For Your Business Operations
The standard FAQ leaves a lot to be desired for on the customer side. That much we already know. But what about your business? Your customer service agents? Surely, there must be a better solution than just typing out articles and then tossing them up into the internet. Right?
Powerful Sorting and Organization
Compared to the standard FAQ where everything was drafted in a fixed interface, the better FAQ allows you to drag and drop topics and articles with a click of a button, allowing you to quickly prioritize or de-emphasize certain content.
Controlled Drafting
The better FAQ offers content creators more control over how content is found, displayed, and published. The Re:amaze FAQ platform enables keyword tags that works hand-in-hand with search. Articles can also be published in an internal and draft state to invite further collaboration before it goes live.
Agent Assistance Via Quick Actions
The standard FAQ is handicapped because customer service agents will have a hard time referring a customer to a particular piece of FAQ content. Because the standard FAQ content does not support unique URLs, it becomes virtually impossible to link something to a customer. Alternatively, the better FAQ offers a simple way for customer service agents to quickly look for an article within the FAQ database and insert it instantly as a hyperlink. Customer service is streamlined and agents can provide faster support through pre-drafted FAQ content.
Multiformat FAQ
An FAQ should be easily accessible by the nature of its purpose and definition. Customers with frequently-asked questions should be allowed to self-help whenever possible. There are several advantages to this:
- It’s all about customer education. And educating customers at every given opportunity does wonders for customer conversions and loyalty.
- It helps make customer service faster by allowing agents to send customers FAQ articles that will help them directly.
- It alleviates high volume days. FAQs can be a godsend when it comes to reducing customer service volume. And a well composed, well thought-out FAQ makes all the difference.
The better FAQ can be loaded within the Re:amaze live chat experience, it can be hosted on its own domain with a customized URL, and can even be embedded within a website for inline displaying of content. Your FAQ is meant to work with Live Chat. It’s like a match made in heaven.
Conclusion
There are many different ways to skin a potato. FAQs is a widely used tool for many websites, apps, and services on the internet. If you’re going to build one, which we highly recommend, it’s best to plan out how your customers will be interacting with it and how your customer service team can take advantage it.
Interested in what else we have to say? Make sure to recommend this article by clapping and follow us for more stories about startup life, customer service, and tips on treating customers right.
You can also find our multi-brand, multi-channel customer service platform at https://www.reamaze.com. Follow @reamaze.