Hey there,

How much time do you and your team waste answering the same simple questions over and over, and over again?

More importantly how much time do your customers and your team waste asking them?

Lovely as it is to be needed, to be the fount of all knowledge, the centre of your organisation's universe, it does mean you turn yourself into a great big bottleneck.

And the longer you let this go on, the less your team are inclined to use their intiative. After all, why work out an answer for yourself when its easier (and probably safer) just to ask the boss?

That means that one of the easiest ways to start freeing yourself up to take a break is stop being 'the only one who knows', to give everyone the benefit of your experience, and enable your team to answer common questions for themselves and for your clients.

So today I'm going to talk about how to reduce the time everyone spends answering those Frequently Asked Questions.

Obviously the best long-term solution is to design out the need to ask a question in the first place.

Until then, start by:

• Collating and sharing the questions you already know you get, together with the answers you already give.
• Building a mechanism for collecting new questions and adding them to your list.
• Making sure everyone gets into the habit of looking them up instead of turning to you for the answer.

Here's how to go about it:

Step 1) Brainstorm your first FAQ collection:

• Get your whole team together for 1 hour.
• Nominate two people to write everything up.
• Give everyone loads of sticky notes.
• Give everyone 5 minutes to write down all the questions they've ever been asked by a client - even the 'stupid' ones.
• Collect all the sticky notes together, and get rid of duplicates.
• Stick the final list up in a single column on a wall or white board, leave space next to them for the answers.
• Now, question by question:
  • Get everyone to write down their answers to this specific question on more sticky notes.
  • Put all the answers up next to the relevant question.
  • Get everyone to choose the best answer. Majority vote wins.
  • Discard the rest.
• Once you've answered all the questions you can in the hour, stop.
• If you need another session, to cover the rest of the questions, book it now.

Step 2) Save the questions and answers where everyone can find them:

• The nominated scribes write them all up into a single document*.
• Give this document a name that is easily identifiable as the latest version - e.g. call it something like "<Your Organisation>'s FAQs as of YY/MM/DD"
• Save it somewhere where everyone has access to it - e.g. on a shared drive or a shared Google document.
• Make sure everyone knows where it is.

Step 3) Publish the FAQs to your website:

• Nominate someone to add all the questions and their answers to your organisation's website, so your clients and prospects can find answers for themselves if they want to.
• Set aside a regular time for someone to go through the FAQs sheet for new questions and answers to be added to the website.

Step 4) Collect new Questions as they are asked:

• Every time anyone gets asked a new question, add it to the list.
• Then get it added to your website.

*To help you, I've made a simple "<Your Organisation>'s FAQs" Google Sheet to get you started:

Make a copy of this Sheet (with the date), and save it to wherever it can be found and updated by everyone in your organisation.

Step 5) Give your team permission to look up FAQ answers for a client:

People often assume they must appear to know the answer to a question, even if they don't, otherwise the client will lose faith.

That's just not true.

In my experience running a virtual office for around 20 very different and demanding clients, we always found that callers were more than happy to have you look things up on the spot.

So, once everyone has access to the central list of FAQs, make sure everyone knows they can use it openly with clients.

If a caller asks a question, people can say something like:

'I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head, but I can look up the answer for you now, just let me bring up our FAQs....'

After a while, people will remember the answer without needing to look it up at all.

If you get asked a new question, that isn't in the FAQs, they can say something like:

'It looks like we haven't had this question before, let me get back to you with an answer. Give me your preferred contact number and I'll call you back in 10 minutes'.

Make sure people do get back to them in 10 minutes.

And of course, once the answer has been found, add it with the original question to your FAQs list.

Step 6) Train yourself:

This will feel extremely awkward at first, as it goes against every helpful instinct, but all the work you've all put into collating FAQs will be wasted unless you stop answering questions!

So, every time a team member asks you a question, ask them back:

"What does it say in the FAQs?"

Get them to look it up there and then, in front of you. If the answer isn't there, give them the answer, then get them to add it to the list immediately.

Step 7) Train your team:

Give every person on your team permission to do the same thing, and bounce back a question from a colleague with

"What does it say in the FAQs?"

It will become a bit of a joke for a while, but in time, people will develop the habit of looking things up first.

Bonus

As we said at the beginning, the best long-term solution FAQs is to design out the need to ask questions in the first place. So here's a suggestion for how to start doing that:

Step 8) Think about how you can eliminate the need for clients or team members to ask questions:

Run a regular workshop to review FAQs.

• Pick one FAQ and ask:
  • What could we do that would remove the need to ask this question?
  • Pick a solution
  • Implement it,
• See what happens:
  • Do people stop asking that question?
  • Do people start asking a different question instead?

That’s it.

Here’s what you learned today:

• You and your team already know the answers to the most common questioons people ask. You just need to make it quicker and easier for anyone (including your clients) to find them.
• It's OK to be open with clients and prospects about not knowing the answer to a question. As long as you know how to get to a genuine answer quickly.
• Changing habits in your organisation starts with you.

So, start now.

Brainstorm your initial FAQ list this week. Then get them written up and ready for sharing next Monday, as "<Your Organisation>'s FAQs".

Good luck!

Thanks for reading!

​

​​