Over the past decade, as the web has become my primary form of communication with the companies whose products and services I use, I have become less and less satisfied with the traditional Frequently Asked Questions page. More recently, this has led to me reconsider why these pages exist, how they tie into an overall web presence, how they can be more useful to site visitors, and what type of return these pages can offer the companies that build them.

First and foremost, FAQ pages are about customer service. The concept is simple enough: list the questions that your audience asks the most often and post the answers for all to see. In addition to providing a convenient service to their audience, this has some nice perks for companies; they take practically no effort to maintain, and can help reduce the number of incoming support calls. I’m not suggesting we abandon this practice. However, it seems to me that these pages, with a few simple modifications, can provide even better customer service, and become a valuable tool for companies.

With the advent of sites and tools like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook company pages, there’s a lot of talk in the webosphere about improving customer service by making big corporate entities (as well as the little guys) more accessible – by giving them a face and a personality, in a sense. What this results in is real conversation. Consumers no longer have to settle for stock responses to their questions or find a way to phrase their inquiry in a way that the automated phone menu will understand. We’re seeing real dialogue, where a question is followed up with another question, more detail is given, and ultimately the consumer walks away happy, and will often go tell all their webby friends about what a great experience they just had. Seems like a win-win.

Now let’s take this mentality and apply it to the FAQ page. On one extreme are companies like Apple, who have a full forum running as part of their site’s (awesome) Support section, including dedicated employees to answer questions and supply expertise on the fly. The benefits of this model are huge – not the least of which are great organic SEO and a continually-growing library of answered support questions (regardless of how frequently they were asked). Obviously this model requires quite a bit of infrastructure and won’t suit all (or even most) businesses. But scale it down a bit, and we can still see the same results. Try adding a comments section to the FAQs, allowing users to submit follow up, or more detailed questions – moderation is optional, but on this type of page I would recommend it. Alternatively, try taking a few conversations or dialogues – be them from Twitter, Facebook, Email or even a transcribed phone conversation – and post those as an FAQ page. With a few of these relatively simple changes, the FAQ section can go from being a largely-unhelpful page often buried in a site to a traffic builder and essential communications and customer service tool.