Why should you delete your FAQ page?

If you are wondering why users don’t read FAQ, then you are not alone in the world. There are several other companies investing their time, energy and resources in writing FAQs and still, users are coming on the support chat asking the same set of basic questions.

When was the last time you went and read an FAQ?

You’re not reading it. You don’t like to go through a list of FAQs, why would your customers like them?

See the below image:

Imagine you are in a hurry and want to get your answers ASAP, you come to the above screen.

What are you going to do? Click on “Go To FAQ”, then scan through the list of FAQs and see if you get what you are looking for or directly click on that chat icon?

That’s the same situation your customers are in, there are so many things to do, so many products and services to evaluate, there are 10 other tabs opened in the same browser, some even have unread notifications coming!

The truth is:

People search, they don’t browse.

FAQ requires the user to read both the question and the answer.

If you also have a chat option available for website visitors, you have been doing the FAQ thing wrong right from the beginning.

Check out what James Hupp mentioned in a tweet:

Government Digital Service from the UK don’t have FAQs and here is the reason why.

Companies such as Amazon and Google with huge traffic keep the chat option difficult to find so that user come to support chat only after doing their homework. But they are Amazon and Google and have huge user base, they can afford the risk to lose one customer but if you are a startup, you can’t take that risk!

How do we solve this?

It is a UX problem.

Quora and StackOverflow have done a great job in simplifying it.

Three step process (S-S-S) to improve user experience:

1. Search: Provide users option to search for a question
2. Suggest: Suggest similar questions as user types
3. Support: If no matching question is found, connect them with the support.

Another approach is to use a bot to answer the queries inside a chat conversation which provides all the 3 options Search, Suggest and Support in a more intuitive way through messaging.

Sneak peek of Liz — FAQ bot from Kommunicate

Your support and self-serve platform can now be in a single chat window. It is a win-win for a business and its customers both.

And did I tell you, we are releasing Liz — an FAQ bot? If you want to get notified about it, join the waitlist here.

What are your views on using FAQ? If you have benefited from FAQs, do post in comments, would be interesting to see best practices on using FAQs.

We are building Kommunicate, a modern customer support platform. The article was originally published here.