The repetitiveness of frequently asked questions may seem like a nuisance for local businesses, but there is a treasure hidden within them for improving customer service and reputation.
If you’re old enough to remember working at a company before the Internet, you probably remember picking up the phone dozens of times a day to answer the same questions, over and over, ad infinitum. Yes, we are open on New Year’s Eve. Yes, we accept returns with receipt. Yes, we don’t have bananas.
If we thought the web would put an end to this cycle of questions and answers, we were wrong. People are asking these common questions in more places now, no doubt because they have difficulty finding the answers or because they don’t know if the information they find online is up-to-date and accurate. No one wants to arrive at a closed shop or come for dinner only to find that a place no longer serves vegan food or be presented with a bill from a place that doesn’t accept their card.
These surprises are not good for customer equanimity or the company’s reputation, and so the online FAQ page was born, in hopes of reducing both risk and time spent answering repetitive questions.
But, in a way, huge FAQ pages have never been very good for me, partly because I find them tiring to scroll through, but mostly because I feel they might indicate that a company has failed to answer these questions everywhere the customer was found. Before using this execution page.
FAQ pages have their place, but they’re just one thing you could do with your customers’ most common questions. Let’s discover some good ideas for additional/alternative FAQ implementations today!