This is so true in our field of work. Understanding your client’s problem is the most important step in resolving it. Helping them understand how you solved it is equality important.

The process starts with the client. They will offer a certain amount of information as it pertains to the issue they are calling you about. This may or may not, be enough information to fully understand how to solve the problem. It’s our job as support specialist to extract the rest of the details so we can help our customers quickly and effectively.

When we ask questions about the IT environment or transactional sequence of events, it is to better understand the situation. Getting the client up and running is paramount, so we do our best to understand the cause of the problem in order to come up with a resolution.  

We practice this each and every day within our support teams here at Data Age. We have a systematic approach process that goes into every support ticket. Yes, we cover the basics first. “Is it plugged in?”, “Is there paper in the tray?” I know, this may seem elementary, but you’d be surprised how often these questions resolve the issue. We’ve all done it ourselves! It would be a big mistake if a support rep dove straight into the deep end of the pool on a support issue, uninstalling drivers, and software, taking down terminals as first steps, only to find the the cleaning crew unplugged the printer to plug in the vacuum.

Time is of the essence, and time is money. The more we know about our problem, the faster we can solve it.