Alsina González
Specialist journalist and researcher
When you are on the website of a manufacturer, service provider or online medium, it is normal for doubts to arise about how it works, what services it offers, how to contact the organization, or what to do if a problem arises.
For this, there are the contact addresses, so that one can ask directly and resolve their doubts, but we also find another tool, the FAQ, an acronym for frequently asked questions (frequently asked questions) consists of a document that compiles the questions that arise most often among users and their corresponding answers, with the aim of clarifying and dispelling doubts and providing an answer to problems that may arise.
In this way, the company providing the service responds more quickly to the questions that Internet users are asked when using its website, increasing the level of satisfaction and, at the same time, unloading the technical service or customer service much of their work by providing answers to repetitive queries.
Because the main characteristic of a FAQ comes precisely from the letter F: answering doubts, questions and problems that are repeated frequently.
Normally, we will find a single FAQ that answers all the doubts and frequently asked questions, divided into sections, each of which deals with a different aspect or topic of the service offered.
The FAQ is usually accessible from a prominent link, at the bottom or top of the web page, which are the sites in which the sections of the website are usually listed, in addition to mentioning access to the FAQ in some part of the content. of the site.
The history of FAQs goes back a long way, we could even go back centuries before the invention of the Internet, but the idea of collecting a series of questions that are frequently asked and answering them is so logical that it seems impossible to establish a first document. or a start date.
What is clearer to historians is the beginning of FAQs on the Internet in the modern era, and although they do not dare to dictate a specific date and document as a starting point, they do suggest that the term FAQ and the first Compilations of questions and answers that fit this definition are placed between 1982 and 1985 on NASA email distribution lists, as a way of saving time and bandwidth (very scarce at the time) by answering questions to the that an answer had already been given before. It is, even and let’s look at it, in the era before the Web, since it was invented in 1990.
The format became so successful that it began to spread in user forums and, with the advent of the Web, it began to be used in the format that we all know today.
The current FAQs resort to programming techniques that take advantage of the resources offered by modern browsersas is the case of dynamically drop-down texts.
Photos: Fotolia–maxsim/pathdoc
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