How To Streamline Customer Service In Your E-Commerce Business with an FAQ Page

If your business doesn’t have an FAQ page, you’re not only neglecting an asset that customers want in 2023 but also missing out on a golden opportunity to save your customer service team time and money.

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However, remember that a genuinely great FAQ page isn’t just a jumble of common questions and answers — to actually convert a casual online shopper into a paying customer, it must be an organized, data-driven knowledge base.

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But, before we dive too far into creating and optimizing your CX with a thorough FAQ page, let’s start at the very beginning (cue “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music).

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What Is An FAQ Page?

FAQ stands for frequently asked questions. An FAQ page is where businesses generally house the answers to customers’ common questions and other vital information that may not necessarily fit anywhere else on-site.

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An FAQ page should generally be linked somewhere in the header navigation or the footer of a website so that it’s easy for a customer to find during their shopping experience. Keep in mind that 60% of customers said they’ve used FAQ or help pages on a company’s website within the last year, so making sure it’s easily accessible and not hidden as a hyperlink on a random page is a must.

What Are The Benefits Of Having A Detailed FAQ Page On Your Website?

When built correctly, your FAQ page can positively impact your brand’s digital presence, customer experience, and bottom line.

Here are a few top benefits you can expect from a thorough FAQ page on your website:

1. Reduce Customer Service Inquiries By Anticipating Questions

On a global scale, 66% of customers will begin their customer service experience with a self-service option before engaging with an agent.

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Therefore, by constantly updating your FAQ page with common questions that your customer service department receives regularly, you can reduce repetitive customer service inquiries that would otherwise clog up the queue and your agents’ bandwidth.

2. Positions Your Brand As The Expert

Trust is crucial in customer loyalty, and an FAQ page is a great (and easy) opportunity to establish your brand as your industry’s tried and true expert.

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Make it count by going beyond the surface-level questions (such as your shipping and returns policies) and diving into the more technical, subject matter-related questions about your product or services.

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No one knows your business better than you, and your customers will appreciate the self-service nature of a thorough FAQ page.

3. Directly Improves Sales

Customers with all the information they need about a product or service are much more likely to make a purchase.

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If you’re not convinced, check out this study by Harvard Business Review that, after surveying more than 7,000 consumers, found sales increase when brands make information like pricing and product details easily accessible on their websites.

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It all goes back to confidence in your brand and preparing for the FAQs – if a customer can rely on your business to know absolutely everything about the products you sell and anticipate the most common questions, they’ll feel more comfortable purchasing from you.

4. Increases Your Website’s SEO Value

When optimized correctly, an FAQ page is one of the best opportunities for driving organic traffic to your website and improving your keyword rankings in search engines.

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But, by also including direct answers to common questions, you can take your SEO game a step further and put your brand’s website in the running for a featured snippet (i.e. the short snippets of text you see at the top of Google’s search results that quickly answer a searcher’s inquiry).

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Plus, the internal links from your FAQ page to other pages on your website can increase your domain authority, a significant factor in SEO success.

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Check out an example of a featured snippet below!

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How To Create A Strategic FAQ Page To Streamline CX In Your Business

Take it from us – building a strategic, detailed FAQ page doesn’t require a degree in rocket science.

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Stick with us as we walk you through the best practices for making an FAQ page (as well as a few of our favorite FAQ page examples).

1. Identify Your FAQs And Answer Them Directly (Don’t Forget The Basic Ones!)

Using the data from your customer service team (or from keyword research – hello, SEO value!), compile a list of your commonly asked customer questions and answer them as directly as possible.

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Convoluted or complicated answers will confuse the customer and weaken your opportunities for ranking higher in search results or snagging a highly-coveted featured snippet.

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Simple is always best – check out this super easy-to-navigate FAQ page example from ThirdLove.

Oh, and don’t forget – always include your most basic questions. Though the answers to these questions might seem obvious to you, they could be super helpful to a customer who is new to your brand.

2. Organize The Page Into Categories And Prioritize The Top FAQs

Organization is the key to a good FAQ page. Once you’ve nailed the answers to your FAQs, begin organizing them by categories.

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In a past blog post about reducing your brand’s customer service inquiries, we referenced the structure that Neeman’s uses within its FAQ page.

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Every question is easy to find, from basic questions about Neeman’s itself (such as the story behind the brand’s name and how it all started) to questions about shipping and shoe care.

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Another example we love is Nike – to keep the most relevant questions easily accessible, they’ve kept FAQs about shipping, delivery, and returns at the very top of the page.

3. Include Additional Support Options On Your FAQ Page

We’ve all been customers before, so we all know the frustration of hunting down a live chat button or phone number once we realize our question isn’t on the FAQ page.

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Make your customers’ lives easier by including your business’ information on this page. Your phone number, business hours, contact form, and live chat support should all be plainly listed out or internally linked from your FAQ page. ‘Nuff said.

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We love this FAQ page example on Walt Disney World Resort’s website. Near the top of the page, they include hyperlinked buttons to their live chat support, email, and phone number (cool feature – when you hover on the live chat button, it shows you the brand’s hours of operation).

4. Keep Your FAQ Page Up To Date

An FAQ page with outdated information isn’t helpful to a customer, so ensure that you’re consistently adding new questions collected by your customer service team and updating the answers to existing questions.

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For example, if you begin releasing new products, you’ll want to create FAQs specifically for those items and monitor any recurring FAQs in tickets that your customer service team handles.

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It’s easy to think of building out your FAQ page as a “set and forget” task, but reviewing it at least once a month for clarity is the key to making it an asset in your business.

Outsource Customer Service To TalentPop To Start Collecting Better Data For Your FAQ Page And Improve Customer Service

How you present your FAQ page matters more than simply whether or not you have one. Just as a slow or outdated website will impact your customers’ first impressions of your brand, a disorganized or poorly-executed FAQ page can detract from your overall customer experience and cost you both customers and money.

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By outsourcing customer service to TalentPop and investing in E-Commerce helpdesk software, you can start collecting better data to improve CX and make your FAQ page a top salesperson in your business.

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To get started today, schedule a call with our team, and we’ll show you how our qualified customer service agents can help you make data collection for FAQs a priority in 2023.