Your FAQ could be answering 40% of support requests and save you 8 hrs/mo

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

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:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

"You give the same answer you always give. Another 5 minutes of your (and your customer’s) life wasted."<p>For <i>certain types of businesses</i> 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 &#60; 30 seconds) is a great opportunity to try to sell them something else or even answer a survey question etc.<p>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 <i>someone will definitely be reading</i> and not ignoring like a sales email. Even if you are not selling anything there is a value to that.

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

<i>So why the hell are we still wasting time responding to the same damn questions?</i><p>Because customers never read anyway.

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.

I'm working to help improve <a href="http://dropbox.com/help" rel="nofollow">http://dropbox.com/help</a><p>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).<p>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.<p>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

Is there a good equivalent to UserVoice for internal helpdesks? (Or is UserVoice flexible enough to work well in an internal situation?)<p>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.

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

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