As a former IT help desk person, I can confirm that we do in fact love it when people give us good info. People who write screen broke shouldn’t be working with technology more advanced than a shovel
I find this a fascinating phenomenon. Some of it is ignorance of the technology. Which I get because you can’t expect everyone to be experts (but if you don’t know the difference between a browser and your desktop just fuck off back to the bronze age).
The other is a true lack of empathy in the context of communication. Being able to communicate effectively with an equal onus on both parties to understand and adapt the dialog until the information has effectively been transferred is not hard, really, but some people just don’t care enough about the person on the other end of the line to be bothered.
That is infuriating when you’re trying to be helpful.
Developer here, same applies to bug reports, I have one or two clients that have realised if they put in a high quality bug report, the Dev team will just jump on it straight away because they have all the info they need and we love fixing bugs. Whereas the vast majority of “X doesn’t work”, or “I can’t do Y” tickets have to be triaged by the support team which can take hours or days.
Tl;dr Give your techs all the info they need to be able to investigate your problem and you’ll get faster service and more respect.
My wife’s standing at her company’s IT dept skyrocketed during COVID lockdowns.
Why? Because we were both working from home, and aside from helping her with basic troubleshooting, I also helped her formulate her tickets better.
Turns out, tech support folks like it when a ticket has concise info, instead of “screen broke”.
As a former IT help desk person, I can confirm that we do in fact love it when people give us good info. People who write screen broke shouldn’t be working with technology more advanced than a shovel
“please call so and so, they’re having issues with their browser”
Call the user, they are out for the day. Leave message to call back
Either never hear back or the issue was not browser related
Either way, tell the original ticket creator to have the person having the issue call us if they want prompt service
Shovel gay, pen have, paper end, rock good.
My God the amount of times I have to pull the frickin issue out of people…
It doesn’t work.
I find this a fascinating phenomenon. Some of it is ignorance of the technology. Which I get because you can’t expect everyone to be experts (but if you don’t know the difference between a browser and your desktop just fuck off back to the bronze age).
The other is a true lack of empathy in the context of communication. Being able to communicate effectively with an equal onus on both parties to understand and adapt the dialog until the information has effectively been transferred is not hard, really, but some people just don’t care enough about the person on the other end of the line to be bothered.
That is infuriating when you’re trying to be helpful.
It’s the same as going to a mechanic and saying “my car doesn’t work!” No shit? That’s usually why people come here. Wanna be more specific?
Developer here, same applies to bug reports, I have one or two clients that have realised if they put in a high quality bug report, the Dev team will just jump on it straight away because they have all the info they need and we love fixing bugs. Whereas the vast majority of “X doesn’t work”, or “I can’t do Y” tickets have to be triaged by the support team which can take hours or days.
Tl;dr Give your techs all the info they need to be able to investigate your problem and you’ll get faster service and more respect.