The Clear Road Forward to Customer Prosperity: Part 3

Self-navigation Through Data-Driven FAQs

The key to self-navigation is efficacy. When you’re on a long road trip and see a detour pop up on your phone that could help you avoid a standstill, your impending decision whether or not to trust your navigation app could have a drastic impact on your next 20 miles. And usually it’s great that you have that choice.

But if you decide to go with the recommended detour and that detour ends up taking longer than the original route, you become even more frustrated than if you chose that same route without the guidance of the navigation app. This is because you put your faith in an external resource to avoid guesswork, and it led you astray.

Self-assist tools are only as good as they are accurate.

On the flip side, it is so unbelievably satisfying when that detour saves you even five minutes. You trusted the technology, and it paid off.

That’s why features like in-app FAQs that are well-executed are seriously helpful in retaining users and growing your business. Users can improve their own customer experience, and feel that sense of achievement in doing so. Without ever having to leave the app, users can quickly find answers to their problems and continue seamlessly along their user journey.

Being able to quickly remedy a problem can be the determining factor of whether or not the user will continue to explore your app. A quick resolution is everything. That makes features like the ability to suggest FAQs based on keywords, while the user is still typing, so valuable.

Predictive FAQs are also a great way to pique your users’ interest in other topics. They might find something that surprises them, learn something new, and become even more engaged in your app.

The other obvious benefit (that still should be highlighted) of having a solid FAQ base is that if users can help themselves, they’ll submit fewer tickets or issues to your support team, which saves them time and your company money. That also equates to your team members being able to allocate the majority of their time towards the users who matter most, those who have the deepest commitment to your product and the deepest pockets to support it.

Without Analytics, FAQs Are Just Faultily Answered Questions

But again, these benefits evaporate if your FAQs are not on point nor relevant to the user’s issues and experience. The best way to ensure efficacy is to pay attention to FAQ analytics on an ongoing basis, and continually adapt and make changes as necessary.

Through Helpshift Analytics, you can:

• See whether users are finding specific FAQs helpful
• Monitor what topics users are searching for and writing in about (by assigning topic-specific tags)
• Create a more extensive FAQ base around the topics (tags) that continue to pop up
• Analyze the frequency with which your support team refers to specific FAQs when responding to customer issues
• Update searchable keywords to help users find the most relevant FAQs to their evolving questions

Just Keep Checking (and Improving)

Every time you check analytics, you should evaluate which FAQs are working, which need to be improved, and what content needs to be added or removed. Carefully consider what your users may be searching for and add keywords for relevant FAQs accordingly. Include video and screenshots for users who prefer visual mediums. Write in clear and concise language, and always link to other resources that could help or simply be of interest for continuing engagement.

As you improve the efficacy of your FAQs, you should see a reduction in tickets or issues filed in regards to those topics. And as you expand the number of relevant topics that your FAQs cover, your support structure should become more streamlined and efficient, freeing up additional resources for business growth and development in the process.