Businesses need to build FAQ pages for users asking popular and generic questions. Most people go through the FAQ page first before contacting customer support through live chatbots, phone, and email.
Having a well-structured FAQ page or section on your website has many advantages, including improved customer experience, reduced support requests, and powerful analytics. So how do you build one that works?
Steps for Building An FAQ Page
A FAQ page should capture the essence of what your product or service offers, how it helps users, and guidelines through typical milestones and challenges. The FAQ page should describe how to find support for various activities, including creating accounts, subscriptions, payments, discounts, and more. Your FAQ page should be unique to your audience, products, and services.
Here are five steps to follow when building an FAQ page:
1. Identify Your FAQs
Your audience will ask varied questions about everything, so you must sift through to identify popular inquiries and areas of concern. You can then address these issues on your FAQ page using specific questions and answers. The first step of building a FAQ page is identifying the different questions your customers/visitors/audiences are asking.
This information can be collected through a variety of methods, including surveying your customer service representatives, gathering data from archived support tickets, or an analytical review of your website’s traffic and search data.
Visitors will naturally have many questions to ask, and you can't include everything. Select questions seeking to elaborate, provide clarity, or give instructions about specific issues. Early on, these should be the most common questions or those that are creating the most friction for your user. Then over time, track how visitors use your FAQ page, and improve the content.
2. Provide Clear & Concise Answers
Each FAQ topic needs a clear and concise answer without unnecessary extra details. Organizing answers might seem effortless, but many businesses get it wrong. If the question draws an extended explanation, consider breaking it into more parts to offer clarity on specific issues. FAQ answers should aim to be short and straight to the point.
There are various techniques used to shorten FAQ answers and still provide valuable information to the user. Instead of describing every step, you can feature screenshots or send readers to other pages with more details. Make sure each question has a short, simple, and clear answer and link to more extensive resources if necessary.
3. Add Visuals (images, videos, GIFs)
When your users are in search of answers, oftentimes they may have limited technical understanding of the issue at hand, or may have limited time in which a solution is needed. An undeveloped wall of text can leave your visitors frustrated or cause them to start searching for answers elsewhere.
Further, it's important that the answers contained within your FAQs page are accessible to users of every experience level and situation. The implementation of multimedia visuals such as images, infographics, GIFs or videos can create a far more instructive and successful FAQ page, and also serves to make your page significantly more aesthetically pleasing as well.
4. Design the FAQ Page
FAQ page design is as important as the questions and answers. The page needs to be aesthetically pleasing, clean, and user-friendly with straightforward navigation. Think about your users' different devices and how the FAQ page will appear. The FAQ page should be sleek, mobile-friendly, easy to use and appealing to the eye. Users should want to engage with your FAQ page.
Each visitor will have their individual preference and technique when using self-help tools. Your FAQ page should try to support multiple paths. Make sure users can easily find what they are looking for. Create nice flows with well-organized folders. Ensure your search tool can find the results users would expect. Add shortcuts to popular articles.
5. Add Relevant Links
FAQ pages need dynamic elements and fresh content. Questions and answers are the most important parts of the page, but you should ensure your audience finds helpful information. Adding relevant links is an effective way to send your readers to other supplemental information or related articles. You can also include links to other support options for further assistance.
If you feature screenshots, you could include links to pages where the images are taken from. Ensure the links are relevant to the question/answer and provide valuable information the reader seeks. You should also make sure to update or add new links as new supplemental information becomes available. This will help make sure your FAQs stay fresh and up to date.
Build Your FAQ
Self-help is a crucial arm of your overall customer support. In fact, over 70% of users prefer to use a self-help solution before contacting customer support.
I'd recommend evaluating your current self-help tools and imagine yourself in your users shoes. Try to find answers to problems. Same approach for customer support teams. How easily can a customer support team member find information? How easy is it for you to update your knowledge base?
Fixing the problem is easier than you might think. At PubHub we make creating a knowledge base and FAQ page easy. Our customers use our no-code tools to create powerful self-help experiences. We believe finding information should be easy. And we want your customer support teams to be able to spend less time searching - and more time helping 🙂
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