He Used CM FAQ to Help Users and Optimize Support

What to do when your website is so successful you suddenly become overloaded with questions and support requests?

It’s imperative to offer a centralized FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page like the one provided by the CM FAQ plugin for WordPress.

The sound designer Alan McKinney faced this interesting challenge after launching a platform that offers sound effects and music. He used CreativeMinds’ FAQ plugin and successfully helped users while saving precious time.

The Challenge: Numerous, Repeated User Questions

Alan works with sound design for 15 years now and specializes in creating sound effects for several media platforms, such as videos, games, apps, podcasts, movies. In his spare time, he records and create sounds and music for fun.

Alan McKinney

After years of experimenting with online libraries, he launched Zapsplat.com powered by WordPress back in 2015 “on a shoestring budget” as a place to share his growing collection of sounds.

The site grew quicker than expected. “Within 2 years, we had gone from 6,000 sounds to over 20,000 and as our collection of sounds and music grew, so did the number of people wanting to use them.”

Currently, the website has almost 600,000 members, with over 18,000 people visiting and using the service every day. The expansion allowed him to work on the platform full-time.

That’s extremely positive, but also presents a challenge: “With a steady stream of users also comes questions, and lots of them,” he recalls.

Zapsplat Header- He Used CM FAQ to Help Users and Optimize Support

Zapsplat.com header

The Plan: Offer Users a FAQ Page

Alan knew he needed to add a list of common questions and answers to the Front-End of the website to help reduce the number of support requests and improve user experience.

“People don’t want to wait for answers to their questions, especially if the problem they’re facing, or the question they need answering, is urgent,” he says.

He started by manually creating a Frequently Asked Questions page with simple headings, unifying all topics. This worked at first, but, as the list of FAQs grew, so did the hurdle to manage and update them.

The logical step was to seek specialized WordPress FAQ plugins, and he quickly picked CreativeMinds FAQ.

The Result: CM FAQ Saves Time

FAQ page created with CM FAQ

“I found CM FAQ due to the fact I’ve used so many of CreativeMinds plugins before, which have always been very cleanly coded and work ‘out-of-the-box’,” he says.

Since the site got busy, minimizing page load times was a priority, so the plugin had to be speedy.

“CM FAQ is another great CreativeMinds plugin that doesn’t slow things down and comes packed with features that make it so useful (both to users and to admins)”.

Now the website’s Frequently Asked Question section is filled with relevant and easy-to-maintain questions.

He highlights the stats feature, which allows the admin to see which FAQs are the most viewed and liked, as a favorite of his.

“Also, users can browse or search for answers, which is another feature I really like,” Alan adds.

Above all, he’s happy about offering users a better service and, by extension, alleviate support. “I am very pleased that CM FAQ has not only helped us to keep our users happy in providing quick and easy access to the most common questions, but also taking some of the support load from myself, so I can spend more time out recording new sounds and music.”