1. Determine the questions
If your company already exists, then either in your inbox or your head of customer service’s inbox there will be a plethora of questions to get you started. Use these as a jumping-off point and make the list of questions as long as possible. No question is a dumb one, and odds are if one person thought it, then there’s a group of people out in the world thinking it, too.
If you are creating your business from scratch, jot down the questions that your friends, family, and investors ask about your product or service. Create a focus group and ask people to test your product or service and ask them questions about their experience.
Make sure the questions are relevant to your specific product and service and that they could make people want to buy once they find out the answer. Always frame your questions in a positive way.
2. Categorize the questions
Determine common themes within your list of questions, and begin grouping them based on that commonality.
Common categories include:
- Shipping and returns
- Sizing
- Products
- Payments
- Security
- Your account
- Promotions and discounts
Sifting through a long list of random questions will only further frustrate the consumer. Categorizing all of the questions will help guide them on their search for answers.
3. Highlight or link most popular questions
They are called frequently asked questions for a reason. Make sure that all of the questions can apply to multiple people.
For instance, “What to do if my dog steals my underwear,” would not be a good FAQ. A better FAQ would be about the product details and the quality of the fabric used to decrease the number of tears.
After you have the most popular questions nailed down, pick no more than five questions to highlight as the most popular or top questions at the beginning of your FAQ page. Emphasizing these questions will make for a better user experience because most shoppers will just need those answers.
4. Include a search bar
This is the most helpful aspect of an FAQ page, and you will see plenty of search bars in the examples to come. Customers go to the FAQ page with a specific question in mind. Instead of making them hunt for it, have a search bar at the top of the page to save the shoppers’ time.
Search bars also cause related keywords to pop up in the results and can be a learning opportunity for the shopper. Without a search bar, customers can become lost and frustrated with the user experience.
5. Align with your brand look and feel
It’s always strange when browsing a beautifully designed e-commerce site, and then you click to the FAQ page and it looks like a design from the ’90s.
Of course, don’t over-design your FAQ page, but add some brand elements so that the shopper feels that they are in the same decade when they click over to it. Think about designing bullet points to align with your brand, or simply use your brand fonts. Make it feel just as important as the rest of the website, because it is.
6. Update regularly
An out-of-date FAQ page can be more frustrating for shoppers than not having an FAQ at all.
Be sure to update your FAQ page with new questions when you roll-out a new product or feature.
It’s good to look over the page quarterly so assess if any changes need to be made. Sometimes a question becomes more popular and needs to be moved to the top, or other times you may switch the payment processor and have to update those terms. No matter how big or how small the change is, make sure you reflect the changes in your FAQ page.
7. Track and improve
We talked about how the FAQ page can provide insights above, but in order to gather those insights, you must track the traffic and clicks on the page. Follow things like the order in which they clicked the questions and how they got to your FAQ page.
All of the actions taken on your FAQ page can help inform your product strategy so that your product team can improve the product or service based on your analysis of the page. Also looping in the software engineers is a good idea because they can alter the user experience based on the insights you gather.
What are the most frequently asked questions?
A good FAQ is general enough to address many issues. There are questions that just about every company answers on their FAQ page, so if you’re struggling to get started use these are your starting point. If they’re relevant to your company, of course.