Help Your IT Support Help you Faster.

When clients are submitting issues for us to look at, what they communicate to us can make the difference between something being fixed in 5-10 minutes, or taking much longer. It's good to have an understanding of how IT HelpDesk Services prioritize work, and what information you should provide, so your support desk is able to quickly narrow in on the cause of your issue and correct it for you.

Each support ticket is prioritized based on scope, severity, and age. The diagram on the right is the chart we follow at Bracer to set the priority of your request.

If the scope of your issue affects more than one machine, you gain a point in priority. If you cannot work because of the issue's severity, then you gain another point, and if your ticket is older than three days.. your priority would go up yet another point. If your ticket is for a department or company wide outage, then you go to the top of the list. Pretty simple right?

We also have an unwritten rule at Bracer, as do most support companies. If it can be done in 10 minutes or less; just do it now. This rule is easy to take advantage of if you know how.

Number one, when you call in or submit your ticket via email, please communicate whether it affects more than just yourself (scope), and/or whether it is affecting your ability to do your job (severity). This helps to quickly prioritize the ticket and gives important clues as to the possible cause.

Second, and we can't stress this enough... include a detailed description of the problem. A ticket that says "Microsoft word will not load" tells us what is happening but it doesn't clearly explain. Are you getting an error message? If so, please send along the message. Is it hanging on the start screen? Please let us know. Another example; "My computer is slow" is very different than saying "My computer is slow when I'm using chrome". The more you can narrow in on exactly what the issue is, the more likely someone is going to look at it and say "Oh! I know what that is, I can just do that now."

Accurately describing your problem can sometimes be a process, but Microsoft has built some really terrific tools into windows to help you with this...

The snipping tool (find by searching your start menu with the word snipping), is a great built in screen shot tool for recording what's on your screen, such as an error message or any result that you would like a technician to see. You should pin the snipping tool to your task bar.

There is another tool built into windows that doesn't get nearly enough attention. It's called the "Problem Steps Recorder" (type "psr" into your start menu). After you launch this tool, you can recreate your problem and it will capture all of the steps that you did to do so, along with other useful diagnostic information. When you click stop record it will package it all up into a zip file that you can simply attach to your ticket.

Being able to quickly put together a little data for your helpdesk greatly increases the chance that someone can review your submitted ticket and get to fixing it right away, instead of setting it in the queue for further investigation.

To recap, for the fastest most efficient service possible from your help desk, follow these steps...

1. When submitting your ticket, be sure to report how many computers or users are affected by the problem and whether the problem is inhibiting your ability to work

2. Include any pertinent information such as error messages, screen shots, problem step recordings, or just a detailed description of the problem that includes not just what is happening but how it is affecting you. ie... "MS word is not loading, it has an error message instead; here is a screen shot of the error" or "The internet is down, I get an error message; cannot resolve DNS address"

Following these steps will mean less investigation time and a much quicker fix.

If you would like to discuss HelpDesk Services, and how they can work for you. Please give us a call at 587-400-9573, or e-mail bracer@helpdesk.ca.