Listening and responding: good questions + good answers = better FAQs

Increasingly organisations are aware of the multiple benefits a social media buzz monitoring program can yield, be it to:

• Ascertain the reach of a marketing campaign
• Collect product feedback (R&D)
• Understand longer term trends in brand sentiment
• Identify questions, complaints and even potential crises as part of customer service

As a result, more and more organisationss are involving social media ‘listening’ in at least one area of their business. In the latter case – monitoring for questions and complaints – organisations are not only identifying questions and complaints but many are also using the same social media platforms to respond to these questions and complaints.  In turn, audiences can provide feedback on these responses, stating whether they feel the organisation’s response has dealt adequately with their issue. In effect then, by using the right social technologies organisations can not only identify good questions, but they can also understand what constitutes a good answer through the public feedback their responses receive.

Smart customer service teams should be alert to this and realise the opportunity that this presents: namely that good questions plus good answers equal better FAQs. Where organisations have adopted a policy of listening and responding to their audience(s) in social spaces, the customer service teams should be capturing good questions/complaints and good responses and using these to create and update a more dynamic set of company FAQs. The two key benefits this can yield are as follows:

1. Creating and updating a central hub of FAQs ensures an organisation can provide a consistent response to regularly asked questions no matter which member of the organisation is tasked with responding on behalf of the organisation
2. Where a question or complaint is made regularly and is not contentious, organisations can also publish these FAQs which, if SEO’d properly, can be easily found by people when searching the internet for an answer to their question or complaint. This removes their need to ask the question or make the complaint in the first place and as a result means the organisation doesn’t need to allocate resource to making an individual response in the first place

Moreover, it is important to remember: an organisation with a dynamic set of FAQs can address questions and complaints more quickly and efficiently. This has a knock-on effect to crisis management as a quick, effective response to an issue can often take the sting out of it and mitigate a potential groundswell of negative sentiment.

So remember folks: good questions + good responses = better FAQs!