Rule #1: FAQs should be short and limited
I managed a support center that yielded some interesting results when we started recording clicks and interactions. From these results we realized we had two options for the beginning of the FAQ, one yielding much better results than the other.
1. When we had a very prominent search box plus a few select links beneath it (like the Mailchimp example below), search went way up. The design led users to instinctively search for their question first before clicking the FAQs.
2. When a page had an equally prominent search box and a long list of FAQs (15+ lines), there was a significant drop in search box usage. Customers clicked around on the FAQs first.
Option A allowed customers to see top issues first and then use the search for the questions instead of browsing and yielding more relevant results.
Option B had the FAQs dominating the page, forcing the customers to browse 15+ questions. After all that reading, they simply felt exhausted and would look for another channel for an answer.
Rule #2: FAQs will give you false positives
What else is wrong with a long, distracting FAQ? They throw off your analytics.
This has been the case with every FAQ I have managed. Customers read the whole list of FAQs as they are looking for their topic, get curious and click on articles that may not apply to their question. A critical message for an issue that affects a small sample of the user base is tempting to click and can make data mountains from mole hills. When you go back and look at your analytics, you’ll find yourself puzzling over false trends for your weekly analytics report.
In general, it’s best to not use your FAQs as a place to put your freshest articles. Let the searches determine what customers are looking for and use the FAQ to serve those selected solutions faster.
Rule #3: FAQs have to be routinely maintained
If it were up to me, FAQs would be tweaked almost daily in order to be consistently relevant for customers’ search trends.
Unfortunately, support teams are often at the mercy of the web team, which won’t always put updating support pages high on their priority list. This makes updating FAQs a clunky, time-consuming task.
Instead, use your weekly data for a Friday adjustment so that your FAQs are refreshed with prioritized content for the weekend. (For more on this, check out our post on what goes into a help center base audit.) Picking up this habit will help quell weekend requests so agents can have a less stressful Monday.
Rule #4: Trending FAQs are not a good thing
Service leaders have told me before that they’d love to have their support pages automatically display their newest and most popular articles. These are called “dynamic FAQs”. Basically, your FAQs are automatically populated and ordered by how recent or popular they are. It makes sense at first glance: Why bother sorting manually when you could just have a system do it for you?
Because dynamic FAQs aren’t what they are cracked up to be. Once an article reaches the top, it tends to stay at the top. That is, these articles tend to feed back into the list, creating another route for the false positives I mentioned in Rule #2.
Manual editing is time consuming, but the control you keep over your FAQs is well worth it. As mentioned in Rule #3, developing a weekly habit for refreshing your FAQs based on customer searches will help quit a bit.