Three steps to an effective and self-sustaining FAQ
A list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) can be a useful means of organising information, regardless of whether the questions are actually asked frequently. However, setting up a useful FAQ can be difficult. In this article, we’ll look at an example case of how you can create a self-sustaining FAQ for your organisation.
Let’s assume you’re part of a decent-sized team supporting a product or process within your medium-sized or large enterprise. Your team members are receiving questions from all directions, mostly via email. Their answers are going back out in all directions too. In general, it is hard to keep track of who’s asking and answering what, to whom.
Some may benefit from this dispersed approach, but it is far more useful to share the knowledge with many people simultaneously. That can be rather difficult using personal mailboxes.
We take Step Zero of a maturing Q&A process: The Group Mailbox.
Step Zero — The Group Mailbox
The group mailbox seems like a good idea at first. Questions will arrive in one place, answers will leave from the same place and all team members have access to the same data (NOT information, there is a difference!). However, it has some disadvantages: the team will need a process to signal questions actively worked on or already answered. They may start moving messages to specific folders, flagging them, colour-coding or labelling them. This can present drawbacks: everything is based on the discipline of each team member and is therefore open to human error.
Email is often 1-1 communication, so unless you include everyone interested in each email the knowledge will remain dispersed. In addition, different teams may choose different ways of working. As soon as a team member moves to another team, they will encounter another way of working.
When the team wishes to capitalise on the Q&A data by creating information from it, they will need to analyse which questions and answers appear multiple times. This can be difficult to spot when the Q&A data is spread throughout individual emails.
As a result, the group mailbox approach will not scale well for your organisation. Let’s take Step One: The Collaboration Tool.
Step One — The Collaboration Tool
The team may decide to use a collaboration tool (such as Discord, MS Teams or Slack) so that Q&A can be shared openly within the company. This solves some of the sharing challenges: not only will questions and answers be visible to all, but people outside the team can also contribute to the Q&A. We have in fact created a “community”.
However, this will likely not diminish the influx of questions or the outflux of answers because the FAQ depends heavily on the collective memory (and search capabilities) of that community. A question raised a year earlier can still be a valid question, but one would first need to find it.
“Pinning” questions and/or answers can help, but is arbitrary: who determines what a good question and/or answer is? Keep that last question in mind, it is essential to a useful Q&A process.
But first: Let’s take Step Two — The Derived Arbitrary FAQ
Step Two — The Derived Arbitrary FAQ
After a while, the team will realise that many questions and answers repeat over time. A team member could sift through the Q&A and filter the most frequently-asked questions, “translate” into an FAQ and publish in a Wiki, on a Sharepoint, or via GitHub Pages. It is a translation because what the team member writes down as FAQ is derived from the actual questions and thus an arbitrary translation at best.
Unfortunately, this approach creates a lot of work for a team, as they must maintain the filter mechanism as well as a static FAQ.
Step Two and a Half — The Support Ticketing System
The team could use a ticketing system, such as Freshdesk or Zendesk, but that is more geared towards a help desk solution and less towards creating a FAQ: it will not help grow a community-driven knowledge base.
Finally, the team in our case study enters the mature FAQ phase.
Step Three — The Organically Grown (and self-sustaining) FAQ
Remember the question “Who determines what a good question and/or a good answer is?”
Questions and answers that are good for the majority of the community is essential to an FAQ. Anyone should be able to easily post questions, upvote a “good” question (rather than repeating it in other words) and downvote a “poor” question. The same goes for answers and users!
This is where tools such as Stack Overflow for Teams or UserVoice can benefit. After a while frequently asked “good” questions and answers will rise to the top, while others will drift to the bottom and stay out of sight. This results in a dynamic FAQ with minimal effort. No need to duplicate, translate or derive anything: the community decides what is useful and what’s not!
So…
Do you want results that best fit your query when searching through Q&A? Do you want a knowledge base that fits most — if not all — sizes? You don’t want to spent time sifting through countless arbitrary questions and/or answers?
Give The Organically Grown (and self-sustaining) FAQ a try. Much like Google’s PageRank algorithm, it will rank questions and answers to get your community the best results. There is a plentitude of tools to start you off!
