All Integrated Workplace Management Systems’ Vendors provide documentation in different formats. In most cases the vendor is providing:
- Functional Manuals
- Technical / Administration Manuals
- Project Documentation
- Configuration Documentation
However, as support documentation is not something which is generally delivered by the vendor, you need to create support documentation yourself. One way to do this is to create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Website .
Today’s Teaching
Frequently asked questions, or FAQs, are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be frequently asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. (Source: Wikipedia).
FAQ’s are a great way to support users by letting them benefit from the answers from others by easy retrieval of information. The emergence of the Internet can help you to reduce the number of questions being asked to key users and your internal IWMS help desk.
Benefits of a FAQ
Although there a lot of benefits, the most important are:
- Reduce number of calls to your IWMS help desk
- Reduce errors in requests (that haven’t been covered in the IWMS)
- Low costs, professional FAQ software / Scripts are available for less than $ 100
- Can be embedded intranet, extranet, internet sites, support pages or forums
- Continuous improvement and development of organizational best practices
FAQ Software
Almost all professional Content Management Systems (CMS) are equipped with a FAQ module. So it is very likely that your CMS already provides this FAQ functionality. However, if you don’t have it within your CMS, FAQ software is available both proprietary and open source.
Examples of FAQ Software:
- phpMyFAQ (http://www.phpmyfaq.de)
- InterSpire (http://www.interspire.com/knowledgemanager)
- Universal FAQ Manager (http://www.universalfaqmanager.com)
FAQ Guidelines
If you are going to create a FAQ, I would suggest you to follow these FAQ Guidelines:
Analyze the information need
If you collect information about the need for information from the people using the FAQ, you will be more likely to create a quality FAQ.
Categorize the topics
All topics in the FAQ need to be categorized according their subject or solution.
Search
This is one of the most important topics of the FAQ. Users need to be able to search the information they require easily.
Relevant answers
FAQ will only have a benefit to your users when the answers they can find are relevant to the question. Delete all answers that are not relevant. (or categorize them correctly)
Interlink questions and answers with other questions and answers
Searching for information is an organic process. In most cases you don’t immediately find the correct information. In this case end users of a FAQ would immensely benefit from a “Other users searched for” or “Did you mean or?” section.
Monitor usefulness
A FAQ should be continuously improved through quality cycles. Microsoft, Google and other vendors constantly monitor the usefulness of the information provided.
Today’s Task
In today’s task you are going to create a FAQ for your Integrated Workplace Management System.
- Find out if your Content Management System has a FAQ module which you have already purchased.
- Create a IWMS Help Desk FAQ
- Categorize your FAQ on Functional, Technical, Administration, etc.
Good luck
