Brace yourselves. Here comes my #1 pet peeve and yes, it concerns you. Why? You’re a consumer, a technology user and at some point you’re going to need to contact tech support about something.
So here it is.
Pet peeve: when a user sends me a one line email along the lines of “xyz doesn’t work.”
That’s it. No details. No error message. No “this is what I was doing when this happened.” No domain name. Nothing. No descriptive information whatsoever.
This is the most unhelpful sort of email I can think of. While I don’t expect you, the end user, to have a solution for the problem you’re pointing out, you could/should at the very least try to be helpful.
How can you be helpful?
- Tell me where you are (what page, be specific!) when the issue occurred.
- What were you doing? What were you attempting to do?
- What happened? (Again, be specific. The screen went blank, the page freezes, links don’t work, etc.)
- Do you get any sort of error message?
Why should you tell me this in the first place? Because these are the exact questions I or any other technical support person are going to ask you. Simply telling us “the website is acting funny” is not going to help us one little bit. What is “funny?” Seriously. We don’t know. And if we have multiple sites we oversee, we have no idea what website you’re even accessing.
Did you ever answer your parents by shaking your head? Did you parents tell you to speak up because they can’t hear your head rattle? Mine did.
So speak up. Be specific.
