Admin How To: Add FAQs to your Get Satisfaction site
UPDATE:
The Get Satisfaction system will dynamically create FAQs over time as users ask questions and they get answered by reps and other users. However, we know that many companies want to leverage their existing FAQs. Since Get Satisfaction works by harnessing real dialog, and traditional FAQs are usually formal documentation, it doesn't make sense to confuse your "real" voice with that of the documentation so instead, create a user that is clearly the "official voice".
The following screenshot shows how Timbuk2 has posted their FAQ questions with their FAQ user account, has answered them with a personal user account and where they can click to mark it as the best answer:

An example of appropriate tags for FAQs and what happens when you mark your FAQ answer as the company answer:

The Get Satisfaction system will dynamically create FAQs over time as users ask questions and they get answered by reps and other users. However, we know that many companies want to leverage their existing FAQs. Since Get Satisfaction works by harnessing real dialog, and traditional FAQs are usually formal documentation, it doesn't make sense to confuse your "real" voice with that of the documentation so instead, create a user that is clearly the "official voice".
- We recommend: Set up a user account, separate from your own with the nickname "[company name] FAQ" (See the Timbuk2 Get Satisfaction site for an example or see screenshot below)
- Add the question part of your FAQ as a Question from that FAQ user account
- Reply to the question either as the FAQ user if the response is your company's formal response or as yourself if you plan to give a response in your own words.
- Tag them with "faq" and "help"
- If you're an Official Rep or Admin for your site you can mark your replies as the "company answer".
The following screenshot shows how Timbuk2 has posted their FAQ questions with their FAQ user account, has answered them with a personal user account and where they can click to mark it as the best answer:

An example of appropriate tags for FAQs and what happens when you mark your FAQ answer as the company answer:

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Inappropriate?Any idea when that Automated FAQ Importer will be live?
Neat idea... -
Inappropriate?it's gonna be a while, but if you can send us your FAQs in a standard format -- comma-delimited, tab-delimited -- we can go ahead and do a manual import for you. lane at getsatisfaction dot com.
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Inappropriate?I think this is a really important aspect of Get Satisfaction that you should highlight in your marketing. After stumbling onto Get Satisfaction via PBWiki this morning, I was considering leveraging it to augment our customer knowledge base. When I realized (via this post) that it could be a complete knowledge base for both "official" and "unofficial" Q & A's with a powerful search capability layered on top, I was completely sold.
Looking forward to kicking off the ChoiceBot company in GS (assuming someone doesn't do it for me first...)
I’m excited
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Inappropriate?Well, Nick, thank you. That is great feedback. We have a lot of talk in our office about the efficacy of FAQs (too many of us pining for our old philosophy classes?), so it is extremely valuable to hear that this particular point is a real selling point for you. We have flirted with the idea of a FAQ importer. Maybe we should flirt a little bit more.
I’m flirting with ideas
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Inappropriate?Thanks Erik. My take on "official" FAQs is that users don't read them because they feel that
a) there's a low probability of finding their specific question in the list, and
b) it takes too much work to figure out IF their question is in the list.
I got excited because I think users will be more willing to type a question into an intelligent-looking knowledge base search tool (i.e., that will do some natural language interpretation) that includes official AND community information. Less work to find out if your question is in there, and more chances that it is in there.
From a company perspective, I would see entering (or importing) an official FAQ as being the obvious way to kickstart a community, and vastly increase the chances that, if a user enters a query about my company, they'll get something useful back before others have started contributing.
I’m thankful
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Inappropriate?Nick, your final paragraph expresses exactly why I think it's valuable for company's to add their FAQs to Get Satisfaction.
Thanks so much for the thoughtful feedback.
I’m of the belief that FAQs are a good place to start
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Inappropriate?No problem. I guess my point is that if I had understood that
a) I could seed my company on GS with an official FAQ and
b) the benefits to my company of doing so (more users getting more answers from it)
earlier, I would have been more interested earlier. I'd put this somewhere in your "for companies" page. -
Yes, good point. We do have it as a help topic and I believe we still include it in the help info we give someone who has just claimed their company. However, we don't really do much to expose this feature to companies before they're in our system. -
Inappropriate?Another thought about FAQs...
One thing I think that's great about FAQs being in the Get Satisfaction system is that it sort of neutralizes one of the common problems with FAQs. That being that they tend to be very specific and don't allow for the many nuances that can occur with a particular issue. In the form of an open conversation, those nuances can be exposed in the ensuing thread.
I’m ruminating...
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Inappropriate?Hi Guys - Martin from Issuu. I'm picking up on this old discussion re importing FAQ. I think we have probably the longest FAQ ever made and I'm hoping I won't have to copy paste myself.
I'm getting a bit mixed signals from the above, and would like to know if you now have some new tricks ready and/or you will help me import our FAQ (please send me a specific template if I need to deliver it as plain text).
Thanks! (feedback at mycompany dot com)
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Inappropriate?Hey, Martin. I can understand your confusion because we have done some FAQ imports in the past, but we've recently stopped doing those so we can focus our efforts on development (which is moving along rather quickly thanks to our renewed focus). I honestly don't think we will be doing any FAQ imports in the near future, and I hope that's not too disappointing. But, if that changes, I will definitely let you know.
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Hi,
Do you have the code standing by or would you need produce custom code for each import? I this task something that a third party could do or does it need to be done in the back office at GS? -
We do not have an easy way to import FAQs. It all has to be done by us. We haven't done any additional FAQ imports. -
Inappropriate?Darn, copy-paste it is then, if we choose to go ahead with GS.
Thanks for your reply.
I’m thinking: prob. not the end of the world
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Hi Martin, As you're considering using Get Satisfaction please have a look at this topic: http://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisfa... which talks about some new moderation tools we have coming out soon. There are a lot more features for companies in the works as well.
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