Roast my idea: Embedded FAQs

Having worked on a customer reviews + Q&A widget with similar concept, I would say one of the challenges here is the UI. There are so many different UI styles, it's quite impossible to come up with a design (even with multiple templates and configurable styles) that looks good and at home on all websites.

You may overcome that issue by narrowing down your customer base. For example, if you build this as a WordPress or Shopify plugin, you will probably need to support 10-15 most popular themes under that platform. That would give you a good number of potential customers on whose sites your plugin definitely looks good.

Another way, that I - a developer - would find interesting and might consider to use on one of my or client websites, would be to go headless. You provide the backend, and the JSON for the frontend, and I take care of the layout. But here you are at a bit of a disadvantage compared with customer reviews, comments etc. FAQ doesn't need much of a backend, it's probably just a simple array (okay, a 2-dimensional one!). So you could offer something else that saves me time. For example, you connect to my chat app or support system, and extract FAQs without my involvement.

I'm in the target market for this as I've searched for this exact solution.

Ultimately though, I ended up getting "CMS fatigue". Every new little piece of my marketing site ecosystem was being managed by a 3rd party and it was just a PITA to manage everything.

Helpdesk, blog, faq, pricing pages etc... there's a SaaS out there for managing every part of your marketing site. The great irony is that they all tout convenience as part of the value proposition but if you actually implement them all, it becomes far less convenient than just having a monolith CMS deal with it all.

Could work, but for SEO reasons I like my content to be in the HTML, not added later by some JavaScript.

I thought of doing this as well and I think there could be a market for it. I wanted to build a Canny style board where users could ask questions, and the owner or other users could answer, and frequent questions could be upvoted to the top.

Headless as an option would make for easy integration. Depending on your target persona though you may be caught building widgets for a dozen different platforms. Not sure on scalability.

Huge CX win if I could be confident the vendor actually kept the FAQs/KBs up to date. Some kind of a timestamp so I know this is fresh content. Another cool CX win would be if you could convince me that you'd take into account and improve the FAQ/KB content if I rate it poorly or offer feedback.

FAQs that are super brief and offer little context are demotivating as a customer. Find a way for sites that use your tool to improve the CX and you have a win.

For product and customer success teams, one of the biggest pain points is creating the content and keeping it up to date. There is probably a pain point to solve there as well. With respect to an FAQ widget, it would be critical that the content would be pulled from whatever the central repository for FAQ lives so that it doesn't require add overhead to the process of creating and updating the content.

https://www.google.com/search?q=faq+widget+for+website

This is a very well proven market and product idea. Which means it is already validated!

Next up, you just need to validate if YOU can sell something like this :)

I wonder where does the data on the poor customer experience with the FAQ section come from? Have you talked to real people who expressed their complaints about this particular section?
I'm curious because I've made tons of interviews and card sorting exercises and ran some user tests. And FAQ was usually the less annoying section of the app.

If you don't have data on this, I suggest you start by talking to the users. Just to make sure that you're not building a solution that will be looking for the problem to be solved.

Honestly, I think there is a market for this 😄

I like it. Would have come in handy a number of times!

The content will make or break this.

Because the widget will follow the user around, the FAQs will need to be consistently relevant – perhaps even personalised – to be useful.

Also, as the FAQs are contextual and the widget is small, the writing will need to be a lot pithier than what detailed standalone guides would allow. This may effectively double the amount of documentation content required.