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How do you handle wrong answers?

  • January 28, 2025
  • 6 replies
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Suvi Lehtovaara
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Let’s say that there’s a question in your community and a community member comes and gives a totally wrong answer. How do you guys handle that?

We, for instance, had a case where one community member asked a question. Two community members came to assist, the first one replying “You could start with this and that”. The second community member continued “If it doesn’t help, you could ask from the customer service via...” and gave a detailed advice on how to contact the customer service. 

But in fact, the customer service is not able to assist in this matter in any way - the matter should be handled in other ways.

What would you do to this comment? Would you trash it? Edit it? Try to correct it and hope that members see that it’s wrong information?

6 replies

DannyPancratz
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  • January 28, 2025

I would ensure the correct reply is the one marked as answer. 

And I would take the approach to add a reply to correct the wrong answer, then use the highlight function in moderator view to visually differentiate that reply. 

And I would consider something I often do: edit the reply with something like:

Moderator Edit: This recommendation is incorrect. Customer Service cannot assist with ____ and it is recommend you always follow the steps in the marked answer from {username}


revote
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  • January 28, 2025

I agree what ​@DannyPancratz said.

But. We dont edit the comment where is wrong the info, we just reply to the topic and mark it as a Best answer.


Suvi Lehtovaara
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  • January 29, 2025

Thanks ​@DannyPancratz and ​@revote, I was sure that I would get valuable insight here 😊 We’ve not edited comments in the way Danny mentioned but that is surely an interesting approach 😊


Suvi Lehtovaara
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  • January 29, 2025

Oh, another viewpoint to this came to my mind. What if there’s no right answer? 😅 Sometimes cases can be, “you could do this and that and if else, please try those...”.  This is what happened in our case, and is actually the case for us quite often especially if the community member is using a device that is not that familiar to us.

I guess the best practice would to make sure to have a best answer that at least guides the members to the right direction…. 😊


revote
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  • January 30, 2025
Suvi Lehtovaara wrote:

I guess the best practice would to make sure to have a best answer that at least guides the members to the right direction…. 😊

+1 😊


Erik_
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  • January 30, 2025

We will always correct a wrong answer by replying with a/the right answer. If another community member hasn't already done so, ours are quite vocal in that way :D 

We also make sure that the marked answer is one that contains the right answer.

 

For cases where there is no final answer or solution, we at least try to guide the user in the right direction. And being clear about our limitations in the matter. Letting them know what we do and do not support, offering suggestions for paths to take, things to try.

The end goal, then, is a user who knows what to do next. Even if that is not the end of their question or problem.


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