FAQ pages abound these days almost in every company's website. The last five or ten years have seen FAQ pages have a real positive impact on Help Desk processes in companies.
I have used and am full of admiration of companies like RightNow that enable the creation and maintenance of FAQ pages (which can also be self-service) that can be part of your public-facing web pages or Intranet pages that serve people within your own company.
Many companies use these solutions to create and maintain web self-service Help Desk or Customer Service pages. If you don't find your question answered there, you can ask one and if the company so decides, it becomes part of the FAQ list.
But behind the scenes, the success of these kinds of solutions is the kind of Business Process Improvement and savings that these pages provide.
The 80/20 rule applies to most help desks and if the 80% of the incoming calls can be avoided and customers can get answers to their questions 24/7/365, at their own leisure by accessing these FAQ pages. You also stand to save a lot of money and effort in not answering these questions over and over again manually, on the phone. That's what makes these kinds of applications, and companies that provide them, very successful. In addition, many of these companies host these solutions as ASP services, and so the cost-benefit analysis shows very positive returns with little upfront, and ongoing costs!
First Call Resolution or "helping your customer close out a call with an answer with just one person talking to them, once," has been the Holy Grail of all Customer Support, Help Desk or Customer Service operations.
FAQs help them avoid a lot of these questions by just taking advantage of the pareto principle (80/20 rule).
They may have a lowly image but the returns from FAQs are huge for many organizations!
Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple. - Dr.Seuss
Good points! The more self-service the better.
I have been doing customer service support for 10 years and I can tell you from my own personal experience and what customers have told me, the only time a customer looks at the FAQ on the website is when calling customer service is difficult. Most people would prefer to call customer service than hunt down the FAQ on a website (even if it is easy to find) or read a manual. The only time people will read an FAQ is when calling customer service is more painful then reading the FAQ. Is that what we really want?
Service desk is a good web based help desk software specially helps to manage all communications from a single point.All like this software's because this helps them to track everything what i am searching for in few minutes.But FAQ pages is very essential now-a-days because this questions help to improve the software systems and advices to change if any changes are required.It helps both the company and the client to solve there difficulties.