Support Pages Make or Break Your Customer Experience — 10 Steps to Expertly Crafted FAQs
By: Alissa Condra
Tags: Marketing, Website Design, Customer Service, User Experience, FAQ

Twitter Help, second level

For short or long lists, use headings and subheadings where there are distinct groupings to ensure readers can find their questions within seconds.

Search Engine Journal has collected additional examples of great FAQ pages, and I agree with all of them except Dropbox (no browse option).

In addition to the navigation strategy, the words you use for categories, headings, and questions are critical for optimal information architecture.

Use the customer’s actual words. Find verbatim questions from your research or customer service emails or phone calls to speak the same language as your customer.

6. Hire Experts to Write Concise Answers

Once you have used research to create thoughtfully worded questions, it’s time to write the answers. But you may not be the best person for the job if you are a marketer, brand manager, or website designer. Writing help copy is a specialized skill. It’s time to bring in the experts.

The answers to help questions could make or break a sale or product experience. For customers without the time or investment in your products, you may only have the time it takes to skim the page to help them.

Brands and websites should consider each answer on the website in the same way they approach a conversation with a customer. Be mindful of their state of mind, the path they’ve taken to get to this page, and their experience level with your product. Often the best person at your company to do this is your front-line customer service agents. Product designers and developers also will be an asset, as long as they are included in research and support activities and can speak to how customers think about their products in the real world.

One challenge with tasking customer experts with writing FAQs is that they don’t often have the time or skills to create concise, actionable website content. Instead, consider hiring a UX or technical writer. A UX writer focuses on crafting customer-centric content supported by the research of your users and best practices.

If you have a UX writer or someone with UX writing experience on staff, they will gather information with in-depth interviews with customers and in-house product and customer experts. A good writer will create the shortest possible answers while leaving the customer satisfied and empowered.

UX writers also will research and recommend alternative types of content as needed. As a UX writer myself, I work with product designers to create rich content like images, videos, or gif to illustrate how to solve a problem.

7. Watch Out for Dead Ends

A dead-end page leaves a user stuck, with no call to action or suggested next step. Avoiding dead ends is UX design best practice for an entire site, but occurs disproportionally more in FAQ and Help pages. A dead-end page states the question and the answer, and if it doesn’t answer the user’s question, they are left without a recommended course of action.

Luckily, the fix is easy. Give visitors links to learn more with related or suggested questions or a shortcut to contact you. For contact, email, or live chat forms, pre-fill a subject field with the topic they were reading.

This example from the Airbnb Help Center gives users related articles and an additional option to select your role to navigate to specialized help centers.

Airbnb Help Center pages give users additional option to get an answer

Another excellent example for complex sites is GoDaddy, which displays related help forum posts on their FAQ page. If I read the article below and didn’t get my question answered, I’d have a clear path to find other community members that may have experienced my specific issue.

GoDaddy help pages show related community forum posts to help users get answers

8. Optimize for Google

When asking a question about your product or service, users will often start either on your website or on Google. Assume that all users who search on Google will trust your content over another website, and make it easy for them to find you in the first few results.

One method to optimize your site is to create a page for each answer. This is a standard SEO technique. With unique pages, you can title and tag the page with precise keywords for your answer to tell Google what is on that page.

However, do this only if it doesn’t inconvenience users by making them click to a separate page for a simple answer. Consider this strategy for answers with more than two or three sentences, additional images, or video explanations.

Another essential SEO technique involves tagging your site with Google-specific markup for rich data content types. When developing your site, familiarize yourself with these two resources for Google structured data tags.

FAQs: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/faqpage

How To: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/how-to

Tagging in this way tells Google to display your content like the below examples.

Correctly tagged content gets ideal treatment on Google search results

You should use these Google tags whether you have your content on separate pages or all on the same page.

9. Update Regularly

Schedule a quarterly review of all help and support content. Look for any additional products, policies, and procedures to include. Outdated support content is not only annoying for the user but could be a liability if you’ve promised something in writing that is no longer true.

10. Display Answers Where and When Users Need Them

Once you have your perfectly assembled, expertly written collection of questions and answers, the final step is to make sure users find them at the right time. Ideally, this step includes observational research. But as a starting point, add relevant questions to specific product and checkout pages.

Viewing products, selecting to buy, and complete checkouts are critical pages where you can lose people at any step for any reason. Anticipating their questions rather than relying on them to find a support page will undoubtedly improve conversion rates.

Additionally, find your customers outside of your site to help direct them to your answers or collect more questions to answer. Respond to questions on social media with answers and links to learn more. Don’t forget Quora! If you write something on social media that you don’t have on your website yet, add it. You can also create targeted email campaigns helping new customers learn how to use products by answering their FAQs.