When you appear in public with a new product, service, opinion or whatever, you receive a lot of questions in little time in your mailbox.
Just temporarily redirect all your personal mail to a stand-by team that reads and quantifies all the questions for you.
After a set duration you receive a compilation of all the frequently asked questions. Most frequent first in the list. You then only have to answer the FAQ and put them on your website.
Those who asked a question have received an auto-reply saying when and where the FAQ will be published. Questions not anwered in that FAQ should be resubmitted to be answered by you personally.
It is not exactly the kind of work your secretary can do. The service should cost 500$ a week I think.
It can be automated to some extent, but humans still have to the final interpreting of the questions, to check if they are categorised and represented correctly.
I have always found it strange that a new website, without any mailform even, already has a FAQ on it. It is often not a FAQ, but just a compensation for shortcomings in the website.-- rrr, Oct 31 2004 I would agree that many FAQs are indeed remote from the questions I actually have. But if the site designers are thoughtless enough in the first place as to get them so completely wrong, are they likely to think of subscribing to your service?
Also, new sites need a help section in place immediately. If this is to take the form of FAQs, then why not spoof them? There is no reason why they can't be modified subsequently based on experience, through your service or direct response.
Finaly, outsourced help desk services already exist. How does obfuscating the process help?-- DrCurry, Oct 31 2004 //Questions not anwered in that FAQ should be resubmitted to be answered by you personally.// I think that questions not answered in that FAQ should be answered at the same time the FAQ is published, by reply to sender - - without the customer having to ask the same question twice. [+]-- contracts, Nov 01 2004 random, halfbakery