I have heard on countless occasions from a number of friends, family and classmates that they have tried to deal with computer tech support personnel, and they just can’t because they’re too rude or they just do not seem to understand the problem. After many years of being both an end user and a tech support expert myself, I have come up with a few ways to ensure that you are more successful in getting your problem dealt with in a timely manner.
The first step is to do a self check so that you do not end up looking foolish when you call tech support.
- Check to be sure that your system (tower and monitor OR laptop) is plugged in, even if this requires getting on your hands and knees and tracing back every single power cable to be sure they are all properly in place. There is nothing worse than a lazy caller who ends up wasting your time because they refused to properly check this before hand.
- If you have opened up your system to add additional hardware, ALWAYS check all of your internal connections to be sure none of them have come loose in the process. Just a few weeks ago I had a friend asking me for help with his system. Every time he would boot his system, it gave him an error telling him that it could not locate the hard drive. I kept asking him if the drive was properly connected and he insisted that he had checked it and it was in fact connected securely and properly. After a day and a half of trying to diagnose the problem, he finally informed me that the drive had come disconnected from the motherboard. “I thought you checked the connections!?”
- Remove any and all disks from both floppy and CDROM drives as well as flash devices from USB drives. In some cases end users will complain that they cannot start their computer because of some sort of read error. Sometimes it is just the case that there is a CD or USB device being read first that is keeping the computer from booting.
- Run any necessary software updates before calling. This could include Windows Updates or any software specific updates. This will ensure that your system is up to date and may even eliminate your problem.
- ALWAYS restart your system before you call tech support. Sometimes the problem can be something attributed to software needing to update or finish installing and a restart will solve this. I have had computers work completely fine after a restart on countless occasions AFTER I have taken time out of my day to deal with what I thought would be a bigger problem.
- Install and Run some form of both Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware software. There are tons of computer problems that are attributed to virus’s and spyware. If users would just check for this before calling tech support, tons of calls could be eliminated.
If you have followed the check list above, you are almost ready to call tech support. Before you do so, there are a few more things you will want to do that will help make your experience more enjoyable.
- Document any error messages, recent problems and recent hardware/software changes. When you call tech support they will want to know what you have done recently to your system and/or what it has been telling you. If you have this information readily available, things will progress much quicker.
- Have any system information readily available, such as your operating system version, brand, model, etc. This will allow tech support personnel to quickly identify system specific problems.
- Take a deep breath, pick up the phone, and dial!
Hopefully this information will help you be more successful when dealing with tech support personnel. One additional thing to remember is that you are calling them to help you fix a problem that you do not know how to fix. This means that generally speaking, they are going to know more about what’s going on and what the problem is than you will, so don’t fight with them. If they ask you if you have followed some of the simple steps that I have outlined above, just kindly tell them that you have. There is no need to get defensive! Happy calling!
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