Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Frequently Asked Questions

.. but how?

If you have a website you are a company. That's what most of website owners think. And when you have a website you also must have a purpose for it. A business goal. Something derived from the mission statement.

A great mission statement
Making the world a better place for everyone who buys our products.

So, then in the final stages of the creation of the website someone proposes to put information onto the website. Something that provides visitors with the option to find answers to any questions they might have. So, they do not need to wait endlessly while on hold.

The FAQ is born!

So, the Frequently Asked Questions section is born. Someone wraps the questions up in some categories and there it is. The answer to all the Frequently Asked Questions.

These Frequently Asked Questions are compiled by some people from marketing and do not hold questions like:

A non-Frequent Asker
Why don't you %$#@@&! send me a working product!
Why do I have to wait for fifty minutes on the phone before I get disconnected?

That's what happens on a lot of sites. But what strikes me as odd that after browsing through the list of FAQs and not having found any that applies to my question there is no way to ask the question. There is no form or email address available. Sometimes after long, long searches I cannot find it.

That leaves me with a very irky feeling and so my FAQ becomes:

How can there be any Frequently Asked Questions if no one can ask one single question?

I saw a good quote on the Douglas Adams site:

Douglas Adams site
Frequently Questioned Answers

1 comment:

  1. This is really interesting blog, I got a lot of ideas from this post...

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for you comment. I will probably have to moderate it, so it could take some time to see it appear on the blog, but I am usually quite fast at that.

When I feel that you are commenting just to get some link spam to your own site,you will probably never see it appear ..