Create Questions & Answers (Q&As)

Of all the ways you can add knowledge to your skilly, Q&As are by far the most impactful, and heavily weighted. The chart below is a loose estimate for anecdotal purposes, but offers an idea of just how much weight Q&As hold:

This leads to a rather obvious question:

When Should You Use Q&As To Train Your Skilly?

Q&As are so highly valued by skilly for the same reason a human in training would value them: whatever documents a new hire reads, whatever videos they watch, whatever pages they read on the company's website... none of that holds as much weight as having their direct supervisor tell them in no uncertain terms, "here's something our customers want to know, and here's what I want you to understand about it." So in that sense, Q&As are your most high-touch opportunity to train skilly the way you want all your employees to be trained.

Generally, the two scenarios where Q&A training does best are:

1. When you want skilly to have an explicit understanding of a topic. Let's say skilly has learned a lot about your career opportunities and employment perks, but is struggling to explain the initial phases of your hiring process and move users forward. You could use Q&As to instruct skilly: "when users ask if we're hiring or how to apply for a position, I want you to tell them we follow (this specific process)."
2. When there are gaps in topic knowledge best filled by a subject matter expert. For instance: perhaps your company has intellectual property that is difficult to talk about with marketing materials, but can be reliably addressed in conversation with your Head of Product or VP of Engineering. Those employees would be great candidates for creating some Q&As.

Getting Started

The skilly platform's homepage defaults to the Q&A tab, and you'll notice there are already a handful of questions queued up; these are some of the questions skilly found to be relevant to your audience when it first browsed your website.

You can get started by reviewing and answering any of these questions, or clicking "Generate Q&As" to add a single question, or clicking the Question Generator and/or Answer Generator to have skilly tackle Q&As in bulk. Just remember, the core value of Q&As lies in the fact that your team is providing knowledge skilly couldn't reliably find elsewhere... so if you're just starting on Q&As, you may want to focus on manually adding & answering questions.

Anatomy Of The Q&A Interface

Let's take a look at all the major functions of the Q&A section:

Questions

• Priority: this manual classification takes into account both how often a question like this gets asked (frequency), and how crucial it is to answer convincingly (importance). Priority is useful for filtering and finding questions you want to work on, especially when juxtaposed with the Risk classification on the Answers side.
• Improve Question: skilly can take a crack at revising a question, and when you click this button, you'll have the option to accept the new version of the question text, or have it try again.
• Three-Dot Menu: several options are available when you click the three dots. Most of these are self-explanatory, but two of the options relate to your teammates: Invite To Answer lets you request that a particular team member answer this question, given their expertise; Start Watching will notify you when another team member has made changes to this Q&A pair.
• Add Label (+): labeling the question with a number of relevant tags helps both humans and skilly find knowledge on that topic. Labels are especially useful when a broader topic or a specific term is being talked about, but not actually mentioned in the text.

Answers

• Risk: this is sort of the complement to the Priority feature on the Questions side. Skilly calculates it to assess the level of confidence in the answer's accuracy, and the level of differentiation in the answer (i.e., how much does this sound like an answer that is unique to your organization and the value it brings). Just like Priority, the Risk classification is useful for finding the most important Q&As to work on with your team.
• Answer Score: skilly has an expert-level grasp of what generally makes for a high-quality answer, and you'll see that reflected in the score. Clicking on the score opens up the Answer Coach, which will help you deep dive on best practices in improving your answer, and thus, your Answer Score.
• Answer Age: shown in this example as "New", your answer's age can be another useful element to filter for when your team is working on Q&As. For instance, your answer might discuss some technologies that are rapidly changing in the industry. As such, it would be beneficial for skilly to notify you that it's been a while since this answer was updated.
• Access Type: shown here as "Use Externally", this is the same function you've seen in the Knowledge base when adding files (and yes, you can add files to Q&As as well!)
• Upvote, Downvote, and Flag: your feedback is useful to both skilly and the team member who authored the answer. When Downvoting or Flagging an answer, you'll be prompted to provide more detail so that the feedback is actionable.

Writing Answers

When you click on Add Answer (+), you'll see three options for creating the answer: have Skilly answer the question for you, answer it yourself, or use the Answer Coach function as a hybrid approach. You can change your preferred option at any time.

We'll go into detail about the Answer Coach in a future article, but for now let's focus on Answer Manually: notice that when you answer manually, you have buttons to Record Video, Record Screen, and Record Audio. These are massively powerful methods to answering a question, because so much information can be packed into them. You can also add additional files to support the answer, and the visibility of these functions just like your file uploads in the Knowledge section.

Filtering & Sorting

Lastly, at the top right of the Q&As section you'll see Filter and Sort functions. This is where many of the previously detailed Q&A features make finding, adding and editing easy to prioritize:

Have team members focus on Q&As that are high Priority, ask your subject matter experts to review the oldest answers on a topic, or use the "Always" Frequency filter to invite client-facing staff to answer the questions they're fielding every day.

When we talk about our FAQs feature, the utility of these filters will be seen yet again.