Are They Really FAQs?

A core philosophy for Woolston Inventive is making people smarter, or said another way, making people’s lives better or easier. This is a proactive approach that positions you as both as a generous sharer of expertise AND the expert everyone wants to refer to. How fortunate then when, once we’ve established that, people are coming to us for more information! A tool that has become very commonplace for situations like this is the “Frequently Asked Questions” page, or the FAQs.

FAQs have become absolutely ubiquitous. This is a little bit unfortunate because they have lost their effectiveness, partly because people take them for granted and have stopped reading them. Too often, this is because the FAQ tool has evolved beyond a tool to a crutch that makes us lazy. 

What is the purpose of FAQs? Primarily this is an efficiency mechanism. Yes: This is for information dissemination. And yes: This is a tool for timeliness (urgent or crisis response). But really: This is about efficiency enhancement. We are seeking to address the most commonly asked questions to spare us all the trouble having to find a moment to get together with our customers in real time. 

In our present era the FAQ page has evolved into the FAQ index. We are not using FAQs to make the lives of our customers easier or more efficient. Instead:

• We are using FAQs as a place to store information. We found a convenient place to stash away information we may (or may not) need to come back to, for both customers and our internal community. If someone asks us something and we do not know the answer to, we can simply say (both direct to the customer and internally to our own people serving the customer): “The answer is in the FAQs!”

• We are using FAQs as a place to record decisions. Rather than (or hopefully at least in addition to) effectively getting the word out, we can record these things here and then we have a place where people will get what they need.

• We are using FAQs as a place to log trends. As we start to hear more from our customers, we can just store that here.

• We are using FAQs for indemnity or liability coverage. If we have already addressed something with the FAQs, well then we are not responsible if people do not know about it!

In other words, our FAQs have become a cop-out: lazy, lackluster, and uninspired.

When FAQs serve purposes such as these, the first thing to suffer is user experience. The whole structure becomes overly organic, i.e., it just grows and grows and grows. It becomes increasingly unwieldy and unnavigable as the purpose shifts increasingly to being company-centric or institution-centric, focused more on publishing the requisite information SOMEwhere as opposed to actually addressing the questions or needs of the customer.

You have no doubt come across clear examples of corporations that have fully and literally REPLACED customer service with FAQs. These are the organizations that make it hard to find contact info. Sometimes they have evolved to offer literally no way to contact an actual person. This makes absolutely no sense. A Frequently Asked Question is just that: the set of questions asked most OFTEN. It is never going to be possible to include ALL of the questions… Imagine how unnavigable that would be!

So is it any wonder that no one really uses them? Our FAQ pages have become dense and circuitous. People are just going to skip them. As T.S. Eliot wrote in his classic poem THE ROCK: 

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

And this was published in 1934! Before computers! Before even calculators! Consider the explosion in information and knowledge in almost a century since then!

If what we have is truly a frequently asked question, we need to be addressing it directly as part of our core message or offering or value. We should not be burying the lede! And if it is not frequently asked enough to be core to our message or offering, we need to make ourselves available to address it with our customers personally. This is how we add value, this is how we make ourselves literally invaluable.