Does your support team get questions like –

1. How do I reset my password?
2. How do I update my credit card details?
3. I am not able to send mails from my mail client.

These could be some of the many questions your customers would be asking. Your customer support team would be answering these same questions again and again. Some of these queries that customers post, require less than five minutes to resolve. But these queries are handled by the support team, in the order they come. So they remain in the queue till a support personnel handles it.

Here, the customer loses his time waiting for a support personnel to handle his query; may be 30 to 45 minutes of wait, for a query that could have been answered in less than five.

FAQ or an internal KB(Knowledge Base), is one way of answering customer queries faster and effectively. Though your team won’t be answering to these queries, the FAQ will help them solve the issues on their own.

I am sure that some of us have enjoyed going to an Ikea store picking what we want and fixing it up ourselves. It gives a self satisfaction that we were able to fix it on our own, without using support team’s help. Well, you can relate this when a customer is able to fix his issue using an FAQ.

You require the active involvement from your support team to identify some of the common queries received. Each web host will have some questions specific to them. This can be identified best by the support team, since they would be the only guys interacting constantly with your customers. The support team should be able to classify the commonly asked questions. The best answer given can be used in your FAQ. A good place to start is to check your help desk and start rating questions and answers.

Once the questions are identified and the best answer selected, start posting the entries in the FAQ. Keep a magic number in mind 50, 100 or 111. Once it crosses the magic number, open it up to your customers. All queries can not be solved by using a FAQ, but some of them can be and make sure you list them all in your FAQ. Make sure to post solutions that may not affect any server wide configurations, especially if the FAQ post is for a VPS owner or a dedicated server customer.

FAQ’s not just saves your customers’ time, but also helps you optimize the time of your support team to handle other queries.

Once the FAQ is accessible to your customers, your next challenge is to educate them on the need to use the FAQ. Having a message to check the FAQ displayed to the customer before entering the support request is a good option. Sending email messages on the introduction of the new FAQ is also an option. Attaching the link to the FAQ as a signature to all replies to customer queries is also a viable and smart option.

In addition, have options for customers also, to post in FAQ.

You could use readily available tutorials like that offered by Demowolf (a Bobcares Partner) which can be re-branded in your company’s name. Or you could use software like wiki or twiki and start creating your own FAQ.

FAQ’s not just saves your customers’ time, but also helps you optimize the time of your support team to handle other queries.

Once the FAQ is in place, next step would be its maintenance. Maintenance would be removing obsolete entries. Some entries may be required to be modified as better solutions are found for the same question. Have an option for customers to rate answers; answers that are rated as not helpful has to be removed and alternate solutions have to be considered.

You could also have blog entries where both your support team and your customers can contribute. Customer contribution in one ways helps customer loyalty, since they also become part of the organization. 🙂

Tobby Davasia Kollemmalil has worked as a Lead Developer at Bobcares, before taking the role of Executive Team Member. He has worked in both the Technical, Development and the Training Division of Poornam. He has over 5 + years experience in the Web Hosting Industry. He is a regular speaker in conferences related to the Web Hosting industry.