A cheat sheet to creating your FAQ in less than one hour

You probably already know that having a FAQ page is almost as important as having a website in the first place. But it isn’t always fun or easy to create one. It can be tough to decide which questions to include or what the best way to answer them truly is. Assembling frequently asked questions shouldn’t be as brutal or time-consuming as it often is. Instead, you need to think proactively about support. It’s designed to prevent problems, not cause more.

So here’s a quick guide that shows you exactly where to look and how to compile a list of the most burning questions into a self-service portal ASAP. Start by taking some time to identify your FAQs.

Identify your FAQs

The first place you should look to record potential FAQs is your inbox. You want to sift through customer support tickets to find trends, popular questions, or recurring problems. For example, you may be getting a lot of questions about international shipping. 

This is a good indicator that you should add in a section about international shipping options somewhere in your FAQ. Focus on questions and issues that are relevant, common, and fairly simple to solve first. Then, turn questions into a path to other related content. It helps to group questions under several categories for easy navigation.

Next comes the hard part: answering the questions.

Answer the questions through coherent, high-quality content

The easiest way to answer common questions is to use images to help explain your answers. For example, if you’re answering a question about how to use a feature of one of your services, walk customers through it step-by-step with images. Here’s how NordVPN does it.If you’ve created other content that could help a customer solve a problem, like a blog post, link to it in your answer.

You aren’t on your own when it comes to creating your FAQ. There are several tools out there that can help you streamline the process, like Freshdesk.

Try Freshdesk’s knowledge base feature

You can create full knowledge base articles with Freshdesk. The structure of the Freshdesk knowledge base is categorized into three sections:

• Categories containing groups of related content

• Folders for each category

• Specific solution articles within each folder

With Freshdesk, meta information for your knowledge base articles is completely customizable, so you can optimize your answers to earn higher search engine rankings.The finishing touch is to add social buttons to your FAQ pages.

Add social buttons to FAQ pages

By adding social buttons, users can easily share your FAQ section in messages, forums, groups, status updates, and comments. This also makes it easier for your brand to share links to FAQ answers on social media when providing customer support. For example, here’s how Apple links out to their FAQ articles when providing customer support on Twitter.If you’re searching for some sophisticated, simple social sharing buttons, snag some from AddThis.

Conclusion

If you don’t have an FAQ page yet, you probably already know how badly you need one. With a self-service FAQ page set in place, users can find valuable answers to their questions without taking up any of your customer service team’s time.

But it’s not always simple to create one. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be as time-consuming as you probably think if you take a few shortcuts. In fact, you could probably create your FAQ page in less than one hour with these actionable tips. Once you’ve uncovered what your company’s FAQs are, you need to start answering them. Try Freshdesk’s knowledge base management feature for guided help with adding and organizing FAQ articles.

You can create support content easily with the rich text editor, make your knowledge base discoverable, sort them by category, and more. When are you going to get started creating your FAQ page with Freshdesk?