Squidblog

When I was planning my wedding, I set up a website with a whole bunch of helpful info for our guests. Where to stay. What “black and white attire” meant (no, it’s not black tie!). Why we didn’t have a registry. Et cetera.

No one read it. They called instead. Or sent emails. My husband and I played travel agent, social scheduler, matchmaker and stylist to 80 people. They came up with the craziest, most unanticipated questions. And believe me, answering them is not exactly what a bride-to-be wants to be doing with her time.

The story of nuptials aside, I’m betting you run into the same exact problems with your FAQ, every single day. Anyone who has ever written a FAQ online, for their company or soccer league or quiz night, knows that it’s an increasingly outdated way to answer questions. I hate to say it, but your FAQ probably sucks.

But it’s so well written! It’s helpful! It solves people’s problems! No, no it doesn’t. Here’s why:

Marketing is not customer service. When you first write a FAQ, you do your best to imagine questions people will have about your site or product or service. You try to make it sound good. You preen a little. It’s a marketing move, not a customer service issue. But you know where people go when they really need help? Your FAQ. Probably not the best time to tell them how awesome your company is.

It’s static. Very quickly, people will start demanding real answers. So once you’ve done some playtesting, you update your FAQ with real world questions and hope that does the trick. Then you update it again next week. Then you roll out some new features and have to add those to the FAQ. You’re forever playing catch up. So then you get tempted to just automate the FAQ, but then there’s…

The problem with frequent. What’s the cutoff? If 9 people ask the same thing, is that frequent? What if you have 250,000 users? Sure, you could automate the FAQ and show truly the top 10 most often asked questions, but watch out. If the top questions are about problems (and they probably are) then someone who is just trying to learn about your site, or someone who doesn’t have that problem, will see all your dirty laundry at once. Sure, be transparent, but people like to have a little confidence in the stuff that works, too.

The problem with “et cetera”. Just as I never dreamed of the off-the-wall questions I got about my wedding, I am also surprised, daily, by the questions and feedback I hear from Squidoo lensmasters. There’s no way that I, on my own, could represent those in a FAQ or TOS or Handbook and Help Section. For every “frequently asked question” there are 10 more infrequent, one-time questions. Every minute.

The programmers need some sleep. Chances are you have a Feedback/Bug Report/Contact link on your site for people who get stuck. Here’s a secret: 98.5% of the bug reports sent in, to any site, aren’t really bugs. They’re just confusion, misunderstanding, or someone who was in too much of a hurry to read that long explanation you wrote in your FAQ or elsewhere. (Of course they were in a hurry. You’d be too).

There aren’t enough of you. (Or so you think). Unless you’re in a much bigger business than 99% of us out there, you can’t afford to have a trained staff of people standing by, in real time, to help field all the questions that come in. But, if you’re good, I bet you have a pretty hopping forum of users and fans somewhere. I bet you have a top 1%, the people who know all the ins and outs of your site or product, the people who log in almost every day and usually do it with a smile.

But the biggest problem with a FAQ is that people explore, learn, interact and get help in different ways. Some like a DIY approach to figuring stuff out. Just give ‘em a manual and lots of stuff to read and they’re fine. Other people can’t be bothered and would rather jump into a forum and ask. Still others are shy about connecting with peers, and prefer “anonymous” (not really) feedback forms.

SO… here’s my idea. Why not give them everything? Right in one place. Do your marketing at the top and let people know the 5 things you’d like them to know, the 5 things that show off the spirit of your site. Then give them a real FAQ, based on questions you honestly do get a lot. Then some ebooks they can download and read. And a search function, so they can find info specific to their problem, quickly. Finally, of course, point them to forums if they want to connect directly with the real experts–your passionate community.

Of course, that’s not a new idea at all. Flickr does a great job of this, and so does Apple.

What makes this idea work, though, isn’t just the format. It’s the people behind it. Instead of getting your editor in chief or marketers to write a FAQ, instead of making your customer service people your first point of contact, instead of pulling your programmer off feature development to answer so-called bug reports… do something radical: trust your users.

They know what’s up. They know how your site works, intricately, and they have insights you don’t. They’re smart and will surprise you (if you’re lucky, like we are) with their generosity. Let them write their own FAQs and how-tos about your site. Hundreds of them. Full of tips and tricks and gripes and help and answers and hacks and advice.

Don’t put your users to work, though. Don’t try to replace true customer service with them, don’t take advantage of them, just trust them. Let the experts be the experts, and your community with thrive.

That’s what The Squidoo Answer Deck is about.

Check it out.