Until recently; retail was the conventional method for shoppers to find their fix. Even as more and more shoppers turn to the convenience of online shopping, they’re often skeptical of new brands and eCommerce stores. And they’re not to blame. Every shopper craves the reassurance that a physical purchase promises. They can touch, feel, and test the products. And even better than that- they can approach a sales representative to help pick the right product or answer queries about it.
eCommerce stores are competing with the retail experience regarding customer service. FAQs play a pivotal role in shaping the customer experience in an eCommerce store-
Featured Snippets:Google highlights curates short snippets from content that directly answer users' queries entered. These snippets feature at the top of search results and garner more attention and higher traffic to these pages. FAQs are ideal contenders for these featured snippets and help increase the visibility of your business.
SEO Rankings:eCommerce FAQs are a great medium to add helpful information on your website about your business and even your industry. They increase your visibility on search results, as customers looking for answers to generalized questions may land on your FAQ page, whether they have purchased from you or not.
FAQs also help capture voice search queries, which are often particular searches related to various topics about shipping, product ingredients, or membership programs.
Curb Shopper’s Anxiety: Let’s address the most obvious benefit of using FAQs on your website. Even before shoppers consider buying a specific product or browse through your catalog, most of them check store policies such as returns and shipping time. It’s essential to address such queries through easily accessible FAQs. They help manage a customer’s primary concerns. Simply put, an FAQ page is a great way to answer questions or address talking points you can’t handle on your product page.
Showcase your Value: For companies that have unique selling points, better offerings than their competitors, or even products that evangelize an industry, it is essential to be able to communicate the value of your product or service to website visitors. The FAQ page helps with that goal. Whether it is tutorials about using the product or questions highlighting how it stands out from your competitors, an FAQ page can help you convey your message to potential buyers and reaffirm their decision. It increases the conversion rate and positively impacts the bottom-line revenue.
Create a Bond with Customers:Say you have an eCommerce business that sells fragrances or skincare products. Customers may be skeptical of purchasing products from your store without the ability to test each product. You can use your FAQ page to bond with your customers and reassure them that your products are best suited for their needs. You can achieve this by answering questions like- “Is this product suitable for oily skin?” or “How long does this fragrance last?”
Self-Service:81% of online customers attempt to solve their queries before contacting customer support. Not only does this add a layer of convenience for customers, who can quickly resolve their issues without any hassle, but it also significantly reduces the cost of customer support. Your agents can spend time solving complex issues instead of focusing on simple queries addressed through the FAQs. Discover more on How to Improve Ecommerce Customer Experience.
Here are some of the best practices to implement FAQ on your ecommerce store:
The FAQ page can act as an interactive element or informational guide before a purchase. It also acts as an after-purchase service, answering questions that may arise after the customers order or receive the products. Hence, you need to present your FAQ page in a way that’s easy to navigate and access at every step of the buyer’s journey. There are several design practices to keep in mind when it comes to FAQ templates-
You can choose to create a features section, highlight important questions or even list them in order of importance. The goal here is to make the most sought after information more visible.
If your store has more than 50 FAQs listed out, it might be helpful to create a search bar that helps customers find the answers they are looking for without having to scroll through too much content. It reduces fiction and ensures they find what they are looking for.
Companies like Netflix have several queries and answers on their FAQ page. To make the search more convenient for their subscribers, they have clubebd their questions and formed categories. These range from payment to password retrieval. categorizing questions can make it much easier to navigate through them.
The topics you choose for your FAQ play a crucial role in determining the customer experience. Imagine being a customer that is looking for answers about warranty, returns or shipping, only to find out that your extensive list of FAQs don’t actually answer their questions. It only adds to their frustrations. What’s worse? They’re more likely to look for another brand that does.
So how do you choose the right topics for your FAQ page?
Go through your customer support conversations. analyse the most commonly asked questions and look for the most redundant tickets. This will help you narrow down the best topics to cover. You can also talk to your sales team and find out the problems and inhibitions customers have before they make a purchase. Address these issues as well.
Once you’v figured out what topics you want to cover and the issues your customers are facing, you can move on to the next step- creating the content. There are certain things to keep in mind when creating content for FAQ page-
Write short concise answers. Edit and re-edit your content to make it crisp and clear.
Keep revisiting your content to ensure relevancy.
Build your brand’s tone of voice and maintain that throughout your FAQ page.
Most eCommerce businesses resort to creating a separate FAQ page to share information and answer customer questions. While this is the conventional practice and helps eCommerce business owners address many queries with information that cannot be added to the product page, creating separate pages chips away at the visibility and accessibility of this information.
The customer navigates through the site looking for a product or service that suits their needs and budget. Not making information available to them as they surf your website is a missed opportunity. Imagine interacting or talking to your customers as they browse through your website.
An FAQ page is a virtual equivalent of having a salesperson walk you through your purchase in a retail outlet. They can ease customers’ anxiety and provide helpful information that cements their decision.
The best way to achieve this is to use Self-service flows to implement FAQs. take Puppy Dogs & Ice Cream for example. They have used Richpanel as their live chat widget. They’ve optimized their live chat for the customer’s convenience, who can use the self-service flows within the widget to get answers to all of their questions.
This widget lets you enlist the most commonly asked questions and provide their solutions. The information will always be accessible to the user no matter where they are in the store.
The self-service flows also allow you to setup canned responses for redundant questions like “where is my order?”. This reduces redundancy in customer support tickets and also provides customers with the power to solve for their problems.
Checkout Case Studies How Ecommerce Brands Providing Seamless Customer Service by Using Self Service
1. Brute Force Training Achieved 69% Automated Resolutions
2. How BumpBoxx resolves tickets in 5 Seconds!
3. Pawz resolved 70% of tickets through self-service
Implementing FAQ through self-service, hence, makes the process more convenient and effective.
Thinx is an eCommerce brand that creates reusable period products. They have an elaborate FAQ page that answers questions about their products- the technology behind it and their use cases. The FAQ page successfully helps a new customer understand Thinx’s offering and educate themselves about the benefits of their products. They’ve answered different questions like- “ how to use Thinx?” and “how to pick the right size?”
Thinx also relies on Richpanel’s self-service feature that acts as a knowledge base and helps answer general questions about returns, exchanges and other Thinx policies. The widget is easily accessible and helps shoopers find solutions for their post-purchase queries, creating a well-rounded customer experience.
Plexicam is a patented mechanism that allows you to adjust the position of your webcam. Plexicam makes it possible to maintain eye-contact with your audience and create a more human experience in the digital era. They’re done an excellent job in providing a knowledge base with video tutorials showing customers how to use their product.
On top of that, they’ve created a comprehensive FAQ page that allows them to answer common questions such as “does Plexicam work with all webcams?” or “Can I use my Plexicam as a teleprompter?”
Bumpboxx is a brand that creates bluetooth boomboxes that atc like outdoor speakers for music lovers. Since they are dealing with gadgets, Bumpboxx saw the need to create a detailed FAQ page which helped answer all the customer queries about its technology and charging capacity and other product specifications.
The Bumpboxx team has added all their policies on shipping, rewards etc on their website itself. They used the Richpanel widget to make the website more interactive and target first time visitors. It helped Bumpboxx create a knowledge base with videos and answers to commonly asked product related questions, allowing them to provide pre and post purchase service effectively.
FAQs or a knowledge base are a great way to provide customers with necessary information without wasting your agents’ time. It helps ease your customer’s anxiety, educate them before any purchase and maintain your bond with them after the transaction.
Related Read: Customer Service Email Templates for Customer Support Team