Social Customer Service Best Practices: How to Write a FAQ

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Even if you’re determined to respond to every email, message, and tweet that you get from curious fans, writing a well-rounded and genuinely helpful FAQ page is an excellent way to showcase the most frequently asked questions that you routinely receive so your online visitors can help themselves. Creating a FAQ is a good start, but if want an effective FAQ page, there are some key points to keep in mind when you write it:

Why do I even need a FAQ for my website?

In a nutshell, hosting a FAQ page on your website helps to reassure customers that your product or service is worth purchasing. Your answers set the standards of what buyers should expect, and if you’ve written the FAQ properly, you can expect to deal with fewer tweets, Facebook posts, and emails to explain the same recurring concerns that your potential patrons may have.

Where do I begin?

The best place to start writing your FAQ is by making a list of all of the questions that you keep answering day after day, and week after week. Place the most common inquiries with the simplest solutions at the top, and organize the list so that those questions with more complicated answers are situated closer to the bottom. Consider grouping questions by category once you have your core FAQ listing, especially if you have included a relatively large number of Q’s in your FAQ. Don’t be afraid to list a few of the most obvious questions and their respective answers as well, because if it’s not explicitly explained on your website, someone will ask about it anyway!

How should I write my answers?

Each FAQ page is different due to its associated brand’s services, kinds of questions, and personal voice, but there are some core concepts to keep in mind:

You will want to keep your answers short, easy to comprehend, and uncomplicated. This makes the FAQ a cleaner and easier read as a whole, and if you really want to give bonus exposition about a subject within the FAQ, link to a blog post that provides additional information instead of stretching the FAQ longer than it needs to be.

Be positive whenever you can! Avoid simply answering questions with “Yes” or “No,” when you can add an encouraging and helpful twist to avoid bare-bone answers, such as:

“Do you still sell giant panda burgers?”

No, our limited-edition giant panda burgers are retired, but the classic panda burgers and brand-new panda sliders are here to stay!

If you want readers to think that the FAQ is memorable and fun, write it in a witty and conversational tone in your brand’s social media voice. Again, don’t write too much within the FAQ, but a little humor and a casual tone can make an otherwise drab FAQ a little entertaining. Have some fun- fans will appreciate it!

Perhaps most importantly, ensure that your questions are visually distinct from your answers, so that the FAQ as a whole is effortless to read. Whether they’re bold, italic, in quotation marks, or a bold contrasting color, as long as the Q’s clearly differ from the A’s, you’re golden!

Is there anything else can I do to add value to my FAQ?

Remember when I noted that the primary reason you need a FAQ in the first place was to reassure future customers? Include handy links to resources that would be valuable to inquisitive readers, such as relevant product listings, blog posts, and videos.

Garnish the FAQ with some encouraging statistics of your service, powerful testimonials from happy customers, awards that you’ve won, or examples of influential brands and individuals who have utilized your product to demonstrate how valuable you are to your obviously curious patron.

As long as it fits the flow of the FAQ, you can even slip in a call to action, such as checking out a product related to a question, or subscribing to your newsletter, within the FAQ too!

What’s the most effective way to end my FAQ?

Inserting your social media contacts and an email address into your new FAQ page and encouraging readers to reach out if they have any pressing concerns is akin to frosting a cake- if you don’t, the whole effort becomes an enormously bland waste of everyone’s time. Nothing’s worse than caring enough about something to find the official website and read through its FAQ, only to discover that not only does it not cover your burning question, there’s no way to get it answered at all…

Think of your FAQ as bonus contact page, and in this era of instant satisfaction, you’d better believe that there’s a solid chunk of the population that would instantly navigate to a competitor instead of tweeting you a simple question if your FAQ doesn’t satisfy their curiosity. Above all else, this FAQ is for them!

Taking the time to write your FAQ the right way makes you look more valuable to your online visitors, reassures customers, and should help to slightly lighten the load of incoming social media questions.

Have fun, think “helpful,” and be bold!

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