The 5 W's

Most of the time when working the help desk we find that we often may have issues with getting all of the information we need with the ticketing systems that are in place. Some companies have painful prompts that have a predetermined scripts that employees go through which often times leads to frustration with customers and less trained staff. I have worked at a NOC or 2 in my lifetime and it seems that only a few people have developed simple common sense when dealing with customers. One NOC I worked at employed the 5W’s system of what to find out when a problem arises. If you employ this system you will learn to create a good baseline of what to ask and further this will help you develop sound T/S skills as you learn where to probe a customer when they are giving you information. I’ll give an example of a situation today.




• Who? Company X, Employee SUE ext 1234
• What? I can’t get Voice mail on my phone
• Where? Office
• When? Just Happened now
• Why? I’m not sure, (this is a place where you can ask has anyone been on the phone system, or where those pesky IT guys playing around again or was the user themselves in there phone settings.

• How? Sometimes they will tell you, other times they really don’t know. Now you have a baseline of types of follow up questions to ask or you can give her a ticket number if you have to escalate to another user.


This simple user today didn’t have the caller search space for her voice mail set correctly. I’m sure only the IT admins at her job had access to this. That was an easy one. Now Imagine getting a ticket that just says “user can’t log into voice mail at company X”. Those are the types of tickets that make people upset. A person who is assigned the ticket doesn’t’ even know where to go. Who the person is, the extension number or where to even start looking. This would require a call back to the customer find out who’s voice mail isn’t working, how long its been and several other things that could have impact on the problem. All in all this will require some support from management on getting everybody on board, but if you could ask yourself those questions as you write a ticket you will save you and your coworkers some sanity as you have tighter tickets for someone to pick up.



Thanks

Happy Networking.

New Job

Well as things have been going all over the place for me. I stumbled onto a job with a partner in the area. I will be moving on from the Routing/Switching world and moving back into Voice. Voice is where I had my real break through and its the most fun for me to work on. I haven't decided which IE track I will peruse that will all be determined in the future, but I hope the road comes up soon. Happy Networking!!!!!!!!!!!