Create Your Own Question & Answer Site with Answerbase

People sure do ask a lot of questions. When you’re trying to make a large purchase, or find a new tool for your needs, chances are you’ll come up with a ton of questions you want to ask. Since a lot of purchasing of products and services is happening online, it’s only natural for potential customers to expect an active communication channel to get their questions answered. While not everyone expects a toll free number, a decent FAQ section is absolutely mandatory.

Answerbase is a web app that helps you to create and add a Q&A community on your website in just a couple of minutes. The Q&A platform enables the visitors on your website to ask questions and get relevant answers regarding your products or service. We’ll take a look at how to create a Q & A site ourselves after the break.

Overview

Answerbase assists you in designing and integrating an interactive question and answer section to your website. Since the question and answer section is hosted by Answerbase themselves, you don’t have to worry about getting hold of a developer to add it to your website and maintain it.

Pricing

From a basic $15 plan to a fully white labeled enterprise plan, there is a plan that will fit right into everyone’s budget. To their credit, all plans have at least some unique features and I suggest you to use their compare tool before paying for an account. All plans come with a free 15 day trial period and you don’t have to submit your credit card information to try it out, either.

Getting Started

The sign up was simple: no email verification required. However, there was one potential security issue, since Answerbase sent an email complete with the admin account password to my inbox upon account creation. A password reset is the ideal solution, but at the very least, they should stop sending the password so openly in the registration confirmation email.

After registration, you have two options – to customize the site or skip to the admin panel. I chose to visit the admin panel. There are way too many links and numbers in the dashboard, but somehow they don’t interfere with the overall experience.

Adding Questions

Let us go ahead by adding a couple of questions to start with. The developers suggest a minimum of 10 questions but the site by itself (without the questions) looks very usable. You probably won’t see a much simpler form to create a Q & A page – just three fields to fill per question. An interesting point that caught my eye and it’s the username fields that accompanies each question. Apparently, you can submit questions under various usernames to create an illusion of some sort user engagement. Also, the app lends a helping hand by generating random usernames if you can’t think of any!

Editor’s note: Generally, though, transparency is the best philosophy, and we’d recommend just being yourself and making it obvious you’re the one who added the questions. Customers generally like that better than thinking they’re seeing an artificial conversation!

Add the necessary tags to help users navigate through questions with ease. Then add a date range and the email address to which the updates have to be sent. The date range is another interesting aspect too. The app will pick random dates from the range you have specified for the questions you have added!

Customizing the Site

From the overall layout of the site to choice of colors and images, there are a whole lot of customization options for you to choose from. I was impressed by the three different templates that make each site look so unique.

In addition to having a full blown Q & A site at your disposal, with the help of the app, you can create custom widgets to highlight the conversation that is going on wherever you want in your website.

It goes without saying that every Q & A site needs some areas to be open to all and some areas for registered users only. This goes a long way in curbing spam and inappropriate behavior. Thanks to Answerbase, you can set permissions to sections of the site without much hassle.

The Public Site

As I noted earlier, the public site – even without any data – doesn’t look empty or useless. After adding the questions, it simply sparks up. With all the tabs, tags, sections and search boxes, the site looks so professional.

To view a question and the answers associated with it, click on the said question. All answers are timestamped and carries the profile pic of the user who posted it. Asking new questions and answering existing ones work the same way you leave a comment in a blog – just type it and hit submit.

Final Thoughts

Since the Q & A sites Answerbase helps you create allow customers to ask questions instead of a dumb, static FAQ page, the app fosters productive conversation and helps to build a community as well. And the SEO benefits are just the icing on top of good customer care. The step by step methodology makes it so easy even for novices to create a functional Q & A system.

The app does have a comprehensive reporting system but strangely none of it is graphical. It’s always numbers and percentages, and graphical representation would just enhance the usability of the app.

So, if you don’t already have a Q & A site, this might be the app you’ve been looking for. In my opinion, it won’t hurt to create a Q & A section if you are confident about your product or service. Go for it!

Share Your Thoughts!

As a customer, which mode of communication helps you better understand a product or a service – voice or text? If you are a business owner, do apps like Answerbase help address your customers’ concerns effectively?