Use FAQs within your credit union web design to reduce call center volume
Answers to “frequently asked questions” (FAQs) can be a fantastic way to upgrade your credit union website design, reduce down the number of calls your support team gets, and provide a better overall experience that leads to more sign ups and applications. If you want to find out how to incorporate FAQs on your website and cut down your support costs, this is the post for you.
What is a FAQ?
Essentially, FAQs are just lists of questions and answers on a specific topic. Fun fact: the nickname may be new, but FAQs are as old as dirt. Over 2,400 years ago, Plato’s Dialogues were actually written in an FAQ format!
FAQs can be displayed on your website in several ways. For instance, they can be listed by category on a single FAQs Page of your website, like this:
Example of a singular FAQ page on SkyOne.org
Or they can be listed on the specific product pages they apply to, like this example on Christmas Savings Club page:
Example of FAQs on a product page on LifeCU.org.
FAQs can be a good place to offer additional technical details
Being too wordy can hurt your product pages, especially if you load up on technical financial terms. However, some curious customers may want to know smaller details like your full list of term options for your signature loans. An FAQ can be a good place to store this information for the savvy comparison shopper, while keeping your main landing page neat as a pin. And this way, all the info is laid out in front of the curious customer, instead of your member service rep needing to press hold to double check a detail.
But more is not always better
This is not to say that you should just dump every possible piece of information into your FAQs. FAQs can be the victims of website clutter too! Overall, people prefer websites that are beautiful, succinct and get right to the point. They won’t spend time reading pages that are too content heavy.
You should talk to your support team about FAQs; don’t rely on guesswork
This seems like a no brainer, but it can be easy to forget at times. At heart, most of your FAQs should be genuine FAQs, that is, questions people frequently bring to your credit union. For that, you’ll need to reach out to your member service team and ask them which questions they get most often. You might be surprised to find just how often people have questions about their online banking login, versus questions about how much IRAs can save them over time (the latter info might fit better on your main product page).
Here’s a few examples of FAQs that can help reduce the burden for your call center, but do talk to your service reps directly. Every credit union is different and has a different membership base, which means people will ask different questions.
- What is my routing number?
- What should I do if I forget my online banking password?
- How do I put a hold on my credit card?
- Can you help me make a loan payment?
Don’t forget: FAQs should never replace search functionality or navigation
FAQs, search functionality, and a well-organized navigation system? All three combined are a slam dunk. FAQs that replace search or navigation? Not so good. Just because you’re implementing a state-of-the-art FAQ system doesn’t mean you should abandon traditional search. People really like things to work the way they expect them to, and they expect a search bar that will give them actual page results (just like Google does), not just a list of questions. You don’t want to have more people calling in to complain that they can’t find anything on your site! On that same thought, sites with great navigation perform and convert much better.
On SkyOne, a quick search reveals both traditional page results and FAQs.
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