Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

by: Dayren Santamaria January 22, 2022

Frequently asked questions are documents written by authors with a strong technical writing foundation and/or skills. This type of document brings a higher level of significance to websites and business in general. Writing this page with the quality and characteristics required benefits companies and customers. The goal of the customers is to find a helpful site that answers common concerns and questions about the product, while the organization maintains a clear, concise, precise, correct, and utterly explanatory page. The goal of the company is to provide a helpful, interesting, and logical FAQ document, that can economize their customer service time.

It is not users and customers’ preference to wait on their phones for the ‘next available customer representative’ just to ask a simple question or two. Creating helpful FAQ documents on a company’s website, “also means that visitors with questions don’t need to send you an email or call your office to get a question answered. This helps you free up time and prevents you from needing to send similar messages over and over” (Lally, 2019). Digital and printed frequently asked questions can be rejected and ignored by customers when answers are vague and not specific. Product’s credibility and popularity are also affected by imprecise and not concise FAQs.

Some considerations that need to be regarded into the composition of these documents are collecting information from positive and negative reviews, responding to these questions in a simple and straightforward manner, organizing the questions categorically, inserting a search bar, and updating the questions and answers based on recent reviews from customers (O’Donoghue, 2021). The value and benefits of frequently asked questions can be measured by an increase in the popularity and net sales of the product, and by the continuous satisfaction of the clients, customers, employees, and users.

FAQs are an important tool for training departments. When properly written, these documents contain crucial information, customer’s concerns, and users and/or company’s recommendations that are profitable for new employees. These tools allow new and current employees, users, and clients to gain continuous and up-to-date understanding and knowledge about the product and organization. When composing FAQ documents, authors must omit answering questions with long paragraphs, using jargon without explaining its meaning, stating an obscure response to a concern or question, and the use of slang phrases and malapropisms.

A technical writer has the required tools to provide companies with exceptional FAQ pages. Understanding the convenience of a space where customers, clients, and employees can go to have a better and clearer vision and operation of the product is substantially critical to every organization. The purpose of frequently asked questions is to ease the flow of customer service and technical support departments, while giving users a platform they can trust and a place where they can clear their doubts. If your website or business has not included a FAQs page yet, now is the time to increase the quality of your business, by taking advantage of this valuable tool.

References

Lally, M. (2019, November 27). 5 great FAQ page examples that you can copy (+ best practices). Tampa Inbound Marketing Agency. Retrieved January 22, 2022, from https://www.bluleadz.com/blog/the-benefits-of-faq-pages

O’Donoghue, D. (2021, May 24). 30 must-see FAQ page examples that’ll make you redo … – G2. Retrieved January 22, 2022, from https://www.g2.com/articles/faq-page

Parker, K. (2020, October 12). FAQ on technical writing. Medium. Retrieved January 22, 2022, from https://medium.com/@kesiparker/faq-on-technical-writing-ed3e4a9ab2a5