Build an FAQ from questions your staff have answered twice

Ask the person who answers your phone to write down the next question they have to explain twice. Keep the customer's wording, the service it concerned, and where the answer should have been available. That gives you a starting point you can check against real work.

Start with a small set of questions you can answer accurately, then decide where each answer belongs.

Gather questions with their context

Look through recent enquiries and ask staff who handle calls or appointments which questions keep coming back. Keep a private working list with the question, its date and the stage of the customer's task: choosing a service, preparing for a visit, or following up afterward. Strip names and contact details before any of it reaches website writing.

GOV.UK's user-research guidance recommends reviewing existing evidence, speaking to people who support users, and checking assumptions with actual users. It treats suggestions that do not come from users as assumptions that have to be proven by research (Learning about users and their needs). Keep that distinction in your own list: heard questions stay separate from questions the team thinks people might ask.

Keep related questions together without flattening their differences. "Do I need an appointment?" and "What should I bring?" both arrive before a visit, but they concern different decisions. Note how often each question appears in your own sample. A short collection period cannot tell you what every customer needs.

Confirm the answer before polishing it

For each question, ask the person responsible for that service to approve a direct answer. Put the answer in the first sentence, the condition that changes it second, and the next action the customer can take third.

If an answer depends on a location, service or type of request, say so. Replace an unexplained "it depends" with what the reader should check and who can confirm it. Do not fill a missing policy with a plausible promise.

Note who confirmed each answer and when. For details that change, such as availability or preparation instructions, link to the maintained page or make one person responsible for keeping the wording consistent.

Read the question and answer together. Does the answer resolve the question, or does it introduce the business and ask the reader to call? A call may be the necessary next step, but say what information the person should have ready and what the call will establish.

Put the answer where the decision happens

Open the page someone would use for the service in question. Decide whether the answer belongs beside the booking link, under the service description, or in the preparation instructions. An FAQ can hold secondary questions while essential information stays visible where it is needed.

Try ordinary headings and short answers before adding expanding panels. The GOV.UK Design System notes that accordions hide content, that not all users will notice them or understand how they work, and it advises testing content without an accordion first and keeping information everyone needs out of hidden sections (Accordion guidance).

For a first version, a short section on the relevant service page may be enough. If a question needs several paragraphs and its own instructions, give that answer its own page and link to it from the relevant place.

Check it works, then keep it current

Ask someone who was not involved in writing to start on the service page and find one answer. Let them choose where to look before you point out the FAQ. Ask what they would do next based on the answer, and note any wording they misread or detail they still needed.

After publication, give staff the live page link. When the same question arrives again, work out whether the answer was hard to find, unclear, or missing a condition. Those are separate problems; another question will not fix all of them.

Assign an owner and a review date to each answer you publish. Start the next review with changed service details and the questions still reaching staff. Remove an answer when its service or policy no longer applies, and check any links that pointed to it.