Turn repeated questions into product information
Use recurring customer enquiries to identify the specifications, guidance, imagery and answers the product pages are missing.
- Evidence
- Established practice. Widely and independently practised across commerce. Nothing here is a Specify discovery; these are the ideas most likely to be uncontroversial and least likely to be exciting.
- Difficulty
- Small. Difficulty is an initial editorial assessment of how much work an idea usually takes, not a guaranteed estimate for your systems. A change that is small in one storefront can be significant in another because of where the data lives.
The commercial problem
The same questions arrive by email and phone every week. They are answered individually, correctly, and then discarded. The page that prompted them is unchanged, so the question arrives again.
Why it matters
A repeated question is a specification the page failed to provide, already written in the customer's own words. It is the cheapest content brief available and it identifies the gap precisely, which a content audit rarely does.
Where it applies
- Any business with an inbox or a phone number on the product page
- Technical, dimensional or compatibility-heavy catalogues
- Products where the buying decision needs information the manufacturer supplies inconsistently
Suggested implementation
- Collect a month of real enquiries without filtering them first.
- Tag each by the information that was missing rather than by product.
- Fix the highest-frequency gaps on the page itself before writing a frequently-asked-questions block, which is where unanswerable questions go to be ignored.
- Use the customer's vocabulary in the fix, not the internal product name.
Risks and constraints
- Frequency is not importance: one question from a large buyer can matter more than fifty from browsers.
- Answering everything on the page makes it unreadable. Structure beats volume.
- Enquiries contain personal data and must be handled accordingly when collected for analysis.
What to measure
- Volume of the specific question after the page changes
- Whether total enquiry volume falls or simply shifts to a different question
- Time spent by the team answering the same thing repeatedly
How this relates to Specify
This is the narrow version of what the complimentary Enquiry Audit does with a single enquiry, applied by hand across a month of them.
Related ideas
Start with evidence
Or start with one of your own enquiries
The complimentary Enquiry Audit takes one real customer enquiry and shows what a structured reading of it produces. It runs on this site and costs nothing.