Frequently asked questions – often referred to as FAQs – are those questions that you in your business are asked again and again. And again. They’re obviously important to your customers, but sometimes it seems like all your time is taken up providing the same answers over and over.
What you need is a way of answering all your business’s most common questions so that your customers get the information they need and you can spend your time working on other things. But what’s the best way of answering FAQs? Let’s take a look at a few ways you can respond to your customer enquiries without spending hours writing emails or taking phone calls.
Why You Need to Answer FAQs
Customers ask questions in order to help them make a decision. And if they’re asking you, chances are that they’re decision is whether or not to buy your product or service.
You could just ignore them, of course. It would save you time and you could focus on serving those easy customers who already know what they want and don’t need to harass you for answers.
But there are a few issues with this.
Customer Service is Important
Firstly, customer service is important. If you want to build a strong, positive relationship, there are few better ways to do that than with excellent customer service. That person who’s asking a million questions may well be the person who makes a big purchase, leaves you a glowing review and tells all their friends how wonderful you are. And growing a business off the back of strong reviews and personal recommendations is a cost-effective and powerful marketing strategy.
Help Customers decide to buy
Secondly, answering FAQs means that you can help customers decide whether your product or service is what they really want or need. Nobody wants to waste money, so even helping a customer decide they DON’T want to buy from you may save you a bad review down the line.
Think of a time where you’ve bought a product that wasn’t quite what you needed. Were you annoyed that the company had failed to give you relevant information, or that they made it very hard to find the information you needed? Maybe you even left that company a bad review because of it. The problem could have been solved for both you and the company if they had anticipated your needs and answered the questions you had.
Save Yourself Some Time
Thirdly, it doesn’t take much time! Yes, if you answer every single question every time someone emails or calls you, you’ll lose a big chunk of your day. But if you write up a good set of FAQs, keep them up-to-date, and present them to your customers so they don’t need to contact you directly, then you’ll save yourself much more time in the long run, while still providing great customer service.
Bost Your Site’s SEO
Not only does an FAQ page on your website make it easy for customers to find answers, it’s also excellent for your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
This won’t be relevant at all times, but a good FAQ section can help your website rank in search, especially for questions that aren’t specifically relevant to your business (e.g. questions about products). If your potential clients are searching for an answer on Google and your FAQ page responds to their question, you have a better chance of appearing in search and receiving a click through to your website.
So let’s look into ways you can answer FAQs to save you time, help your customers, and build a good reputation.
6 Ways to Answer Customer FAQs
1. Create an FAQ Page
The first thing you want to do is create an FAQ page on your website. It should be easy to find and should include all the most common question you’re asked, plus their answers. As far as possible, your questions should be phrased in the same way your customers ask them, and the answers should be clear and concise.
2. Use Video
Videos are a powerful tool for engaging customers and ultimately making sales.
One study by Wyzowl showed that 87% of people have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a vide, while 99% of marketers say that videos have helped customers understand their products better. (wyzowl.com)
By making a video of common questions and their answers, you increase your chance of engaging customers and encouraging them to make a purchase. You can either create a longer video with all (or a selection) of your FAQs, or a group of shorter videos covering individual questions.
The advantage of a longer video is that sites such as YouTube, Google and Facebook tend to prefer them (as long as they perceive that users find them engaging). You can make them work even better for you by creating a list of contents and linking your questions to specific time codes of the video. That way, users can skip to their preferred questions instead of watching the whole video.
The benefits of a shorter video is that they answer a specific question without the user having to search further or skip through the video to get to the right point.
Either way, when it comes to video, it’s generally better to upload it to a platform such as YouTube and then embed it on your site, rather than uploading the video directly onto your site.
3. Send an Automated Email Response
You probably find that a lot of your customers’ questions come to you via email. Perhaps you spend a huge amount of time in your inbox answering all the questions, and then dealing with more chaser emails because you haven’t had time to get back to the first message yet.
You can help yourself – and your customers – by setting up an automatic response (also known as an out of office message) with all your most frequently asked questions alongside their answers. That way, when someone emails you with a common question, they get an immediate answer and you can spend your time responding to more specific questions instead.
If you have lots of FAQs, think about including the most popular in your automatic response, and then directing users via a link to your FAQ page or FAQ video.
Remember to also let people know that, if their question isn’t answered in your FAQ, you’ll get back to them as soon as possible. That way, they know they’re still going to get an answer.
4. Respond on Socials
If your business is on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram, you might also receive a lot of messages asking those common questions. And, like in your inbox, it can be time consuming to respond. You can remedy this by setting up automated responses.
Meta Business Suite (which includes Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram) lets you set up automation templates to respond based on customer queries and actions. You just need to set up a template to tell it what to look for and how to reply and then you can answer basic FAQs without having to manually respond yourself every time.
5. Include Specific Answers in the CUstomer Journey
Another great place to include FAQs is within the customer journey itself.
You customers will no doubt have different questions depending on the stage they’re at in purchasing from you. Someone who has just discovered your site will want different information to someone who is about to head to the checkout. By highlighting specific questions at different stages of this journey, you can anticipate your users’ needs and help them get the answers they need when they need them.
For example, if someone has a couple of items in their basket, they may now want to double-check that you deliver to them before they start the checkout process. By including this question on the basket page, you help them get the answer quickly so that they are confident in their purchase, they can take the action now before they change their mind or get distracted, and can save you a phone call or email.
6. Install a Chatbot
As we’re in the age of AI, you can use this to your advantage and set up a chatbot that will answer FAQs (and potentially less common questions) for you. A chatbot generally sits at the bottom or the side of your website and can be expanded when needed. It provides a chat experience for users, who can write to it like a normal person and get immediate responses.
There are free chatbots available, though paid options will obviously be more advanced. There will also be an element of setup required like any other option on this list. But a chatbot can offer a more engaging and user-friendly experience than other options.
Keep in mind that chatbots can be quite heavy and slow your site down, so if you use it, make sure you’re hosting can handle it at a reasonable speed. It’s no good being able to answer customer questions if your website becomes so slow that it’s frustrating to use!
Conclusion
It’s important to answer your customers’ questions in order to build trust, encourage purchases, and avoid negative reviews. Save time by creating a selection of common questions, along with their answers, that will help users get the information they need while you avoid spending lots of time answering each individual enquiry.
