
Your FAQ could be answering 40% of support requests and save you 8 hrs/mo - rrwhite
http://blog.uservoice.com/entries/40-percent-of-your-customer-service-emails-could-be-answered-by-FAQ
======
dchest
Lots and lots of people don't read FAQs. They don't even read instructions on
how to download something or register software, they just write to support
("where is my product?"), so my advice is: FIX YOUR SOFTWARE.

Example:

BlogJet (blog client I wrote) required entering XML-RPC endpoint URL for a
blog to create an account. Of course, few people knew the endpoint URL for
their blogging engine, so 80% of support requests were customers asking for
help on configuring their blog. FAQ didn't help (yes, I tried); the solution
was to automatically detect XML-RPC endpoint URL from their blog's URL. After
I did this, the percentage of such support requests dramatically dropped.

The next 80% was customers asking to resend their registration keys. I just
wrote a system to automatically resend them, so people no longer wrote to me,
they just filled a form and received a key.

The next 80%... The point is, find those 80% identical support requests, fix
your software or add automation to eliminate them, then repeat. Most questions
that can be answered by FAQ are things you can fix in software.

As for the system where customers enter their question and get redirected to
the related question in the FAQ (see Wordpress.com, Google) -- people _hate_
this, just like they hate browsing phone support systems looking for a way to
contact a real person.

~~~
evanhamilton
We totally agree. That's why we automatically pull up related FAQs but don't
pull the customer away from their flow of writing a message to you. We've
found it works quite well, as demonstrated by the numbers. It's not annoying
like the latter system you mentioned, but surfaces those FAQs that could have
helped with that 80%.

-Evan Hamilton Community Manager, UserVoice

~~~
dchest
I just watched your demo video, and the system looks nice and very useful,
unlike those I wrote about in the last paragraph -- customers instantly see
the answer to their question without interruption.

~~~
evanhamilton
Thanks! We hate being interrupted too, so we are very sensitive to that.

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andrewljohnson
Papering over user support with an FAQ is addressing the symptom, not the
problem. You should consider an FAQ to be a stop gap, until you fix your bad
software. Example:

We get a request or two per week in Gaia GPS for people asking "How to I
delete a waypoint?" and other people seem to search for "Gaia GPS delete
waypoint" on Google too. To do this, you swipe the row of the waypoint to be
deleted in a table view, and a delete button appears. This is how the native
iPhone email works.

We describe how to do this in a page in our help describing hard-to-find-
features (the top page in our Help manual even). But really, we need to make
it more obvious to everyone how to do it.

To solve this problem, we changed the software this release to add a delete
option to the details page of each object. When this is approved, I imagine
all the support will disappear.

~~~
evanhamilton
Agreed that you should be making your product better...I think that's perhaps
the unsung goal with our reporting system. If an article gets read a lot, look
at how you can improve it in your product.

But you can't fix things fast enough and there will always be someone confused
(If you build it one day, user X will be confused. Build it another, user Y
will be confused.) so having good documentation is key, in our opinion.

~~~
andrewljohnson
I also disagree with this assertion - "If you build it one day, user X will be
confused. Build it another, user Y will be confused."

I agree that you can never make a product that 100% of people can use with
ease, but you can get close, and you can make changes that help User X without
alienating User Y.

Case in point: iPads don't come with instruction manuals, and toddlers and old
people both use them with ease.

~~~
kenjackson
_Case in point: iPads don't come with instruction manuals, and toddlers and
old people both use them with ease._

Although it took me nearly an hour to figure out how to copy some videos I had
transcoded to the device.

------
larrys
"You give the same answer you always give. Another 5 minutes of your (and your
customer’s) life wasted."

For _certain types of businesses_ having the customer send you an email that
you have to respond to (and we use auto complete emails so they are knocked
out in < 30 seconds) is a great opportunity to try to sell them something else
or even answer a survey question etc.

After all companies do all sorts of things to get customer interaction. There
is nothing better than building customer loyalty (once again depending on the
particular situation) by using this as a way to send a seemingly personal
response which _someone will definitely be reading_ and not ignoring like a
sales email. Even if you are not selling anything there is a value to that.

~~~
DanBC
> _having the customer send you an email [...] is a great opportunity to try
> to sell them something else or even answer a survey question etc._

Wow. That wouldn't go down well with me.

~~~
larrys
Are you sure?

What's wrong with showing an extra line saying, for example, "by the way did
you know that we also offer site monitoring which you can get for an
additional $ per month"?

It's similar to the viral marketing that started with the "get your own free
email at hotmail.com" as a result of Tim Draper's suggestion...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_C._Draper>

~~~
DanBC
I want you to fix my problem. If something is broken enough that I need to
contact you then, in my mind, your only priority is to get me working again.

Associating your other products with the faults I've found in the product I'm
using might be a sub-optimal marketing strategy.

------
kevinpet
Shoddy math. You can't take the average time to answer a customer inquiry and
then assume that reducing the number of inquiries will reduce your work load
by that much. The questions that can be answered by a good FAQ are precisely
those questions that can be handled quickly.

In other words, it overestimates the time savings from having an FAQ.

~~~
evanhamilton
You have a point about the actual amount of time saved, but there are plenty
of questions that are very complex that can be answered by a good FAQ.

For example: we offer Single Sign-On for UserVoice. If we didn't have any
documentation at all about it, we'd spend many, many more hours answering
basic questions like "how do I set up SSO?", "how can I encrypt my JSON
token?", etc. Yes, we still have to answer specific questions that can't be
anticipated by an FAQ, but we've saved ourselves many hours with this
documentation.

------
antonios
_So why the hell are we still wasting time responding to the same damn
questions?_

Because customers never read anyway.

~~~
eslachance
I write the FAQs for the company I work for and believe me, they do. Not all
of them of course, but I've seen enough visitor stats, search queries (with
and without results) and emails to know that some of your clients _will_ go
out of their way to look for the answer online before emailing.

Customers will give up if a) the FAQs or help system isn't easily reachable,
or b) if the FAQs and help system sucks.

The best thing you can do if "people don't read the FAQs" isn't to trash them
- _it's to make them better_.

------
acheron
I worked email support for a website once upon a time. I'm pretty sure 40% of
the emails were "I forgot my password", despite a large "Forgot Your
Password?" link on the top of every page next to the login box. And this was a
rather technically-oriented website, too; most of these people had to be
fairly tech-savvy to even be using the site in the first place. If those
people can't read the site enough to find a link in the obvious place, my
hopes of getting anybody to read a FAQ are not very high.

~~~
biot
The problem is that people aren't perceiving the link to be applicable to
their situation for whatever reason. A better solution rather than investing
more time in handling emails would be to alter the message the user sees when
they get the login wrong:

"Invalid username and/or password. Would you like us to reset your password
for you? [button: YES, reset my password]"

If the user simply mistyped their password they can ignore the prompt and try
again. If they click the YES button, direct them to a page that has the email
address they entered pre-populated and a "Reset My Password" button with clear
instructions elsewhere on what to do. For example, an arrow to the email field
with instructions on ensuring the email address is correct; another arrow to
the button with instructions to click there. Clicking on the button then shows
"We have sent an email to <your email address>. Please follow the instructions
contained in the email to reset your password." The email would contain a link
with a time-expiring token that, when clicked, lets them specify their new
password.

With that approach you could have reduced those types of emails to mostly
situations where the user did not get the email.

------
ivankirigin
I'm working to help improve <http://dropbox.com/help>

It is a lot more than a FAQ: it has a somewhat good search feature, and also
directs users to an intro tour, the forums, and votebox (a place to request
and discuss features).

Improving it is a bit more complicated than just getting analytics around how
many hits on /help end up searching, reading help articles, and maybe filing
tickets. There is a lot more needed to understand which areas of the help
center aren't getting enough prominence, which topics are just missing, and
also how we could create some automated tools to help people find sources of
problems. For example, if you are over quota, we should tell you that
prominently on /help. Getting automated feedback on search results (clicks on
help articles increasing their rank for a given query), and also from ticket
responses (the article which would have answered the question needs higher
rank for the original query) is a huge area of potential improvement, but both
require a fair amount of work.

The potential impact is actually huge: would we need to double the size of the
support team if we double the userbase (yet again)? If you're interested in
hearing more about this, and especially if you've like to help build these
systems, shoot me an email: ivan@dropbox.com

~~~
evanhamilton
Very cool stuff, Ivan! Looks like we're fighting the same fight. :) Keep it
up!

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2arrs2ells
Is there a good equivalent to UserVoice for internal helpdesks? (Or is
UserVoice flexible enough to work well in an internal situation?)

This kind of "pull up a FAQ while the user enters a ticket" tech could work
incredibly well for fortune 500 companies, schools, universities, etc.

~~~
evanhamilton
Currently we don't have a private version of Helpdesk, but it is something
we're considering.

------
marquis
This would be fantastic in an environment where you have a consumer base - but
we're still trying to solve the problem where we have a huge amount of
technical information for our professional customers and it's difficult to
find - even for our support staff as some issues only come up rarely and we
forget where we put the solution.

We're actively looking for this solution if anyone has something that would
fit this need.

------
rstocker99
That is an example of a great headline. It's amazing how effective good copy
writing is.

