How to correctly ask IT support a question (View from the other side)

The biggest delay in resolving IT problems doesn’t arise from the technician not knowing how to solve the problem. It arises from the technician not knowing what problem to actually solve. Users and IT workers often speak two different languages.

Here is a guide you should follow before picking up the phone or creating a new ticket on the Service Desk.

1. Should I even report it?

graph TD
    A[Something is broken] --> B{Have you tried turning it off and on again?}
    B -- No --> C(Restart computer/application)
    C --> D{Is it working?}
    D -- Yes --> E((Hooray!))
    D -- No --> F{Are you the only one facing this?}
    B -- Yes --> F
    F -- I don't know --> G(Ask a colleague next to you)
    F -- No --> H[Call IT = Global Outage!]
    F -- Yes --> I[Create a standard ticket]
    G --> F

It would make a great joke (the so-called Have you tried turning it off and on again?). If it didn’t actually solve the unsolvable problem full of error codes in 60% of cases. A restart clears temporary files, kills zombie processes, and resets network adapters. Try it before you call us.

2. Forget “It’s not working”

The sentence “SAP isn’t working” or “My printer is broken” has an informational value close to zero for a technician.

A proper report should always contain these three points:

1. WHAT were you trying to do? (“I am trying to print a PDF invoice from Google Chrome.”)
2. WHAT actually happened? (“I click print, the printer with IP 10.0.x.x beeps, a red light turns on, but no paper comes out.”)
3. WHERE do you see it? (“It throws an Error 49 error message on the printer display.”)

3. A screenshot is worth a thousand words

When an error message pops up, never close it without reading or taking a picture of it.

“It wrote some long text in English and I clicked it away,” is a nightmare for an analyst. An error code (e.g., 0x80070005 meaning Access Denied) points us exactly to the core of the problem within 3 seconds. Without it, we have to go through a fifty-page Microsoft Event Viewer log just to find the error. Take a screenshot (Win + Shift + S) and send it to us.

Help us so we can help you quickly. Not only will the technician on the line be grateful, but you will also save yourself a lot of stress.