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Deconstructing the Issue
eMachines Training Department
| Introduction Why we need to take the issue apart Fixing a computer is much like fixing anything else there are many possible problems and many possible solutions. The only way to troubleshoot something effectively is to mentally take the issue apart and understand the individual components that make up the issue. For example think of a car. It is made up of an engine, running gears, frame and other major components. If a car was having difficulty stopping it’s unlikely you’d look at the motor to see what is wrong. To properly identify the problem you must identify the components responsible for a specific behavior, in our example above, the components that are involved in the braking system are the tires, brake pads, brake lines etc. Method for Taking Things Apart How to determine where to start At a high level, all potential issues are the fault of the hardware or software. Our primary goal at the start of a call is to determine which of these two categories the customer’s problem falls into. This is where generic probing questions become important. If they add a piece of software and a CD-RW drive stops working its more likely to be a software issue than a hardware issue. .If at first you are unable to determine if the customers issue is software or hardware, it is a safe assumption that the cause is software because software issues are far more common than hardware. This is also recommended because hardware issues are significantly more expensive to fix. Remember that replacing hardware will not fix a software issue, any more than replacing software will resolve a hardware issue. Always start with changes the customer has made or anything significant that happened before the customer noticed the problem. At times when we ask the customer when the problem started, the customer may expand further back into the history of the computer than we may want. When this happens we need to politely focus the customer on what is currently happening and troubleshoot the issue at hand. Asking questions to narrow down possible problems If a customer cannot give us a clear answer on a question see if they can find the answer. For example many parents will buy a computer specifically for their child and never use it themselves. The child will have a problem but is unable to call us so they ask their parents call us but unfortunately have no idea what the actual problem is. In this kind of a situation we need to have the parent ask the child the questions. In Another example the customer complains of an error message but doesn’t currently have it on their screen. We cannot troubleshoot an error message without knowing exactly what it states. In a situation like this we may ask the customer to do whatever they normally did to bring up the error message or we would check the computer’s “Event Log” for the exact error message. We cannot always ask close-ended questions. Sometimes we need to prompt the customer to tell us the entire story of what happens rather than just a simple yes or no question. Asking questions such as “Has it ever worked?” and “Does the problem only happen when you (do whatever they are doing to create it)”. Will help us narrow down the problem from what they might be doing to something else that might be causing the problem. Simplifying the Issue Removing Variables It is easy to confuse removing variables with the process of elimination. Removing variables is the process of determining what components are involved with the process. In the earlier example we discussed the problem of a car not stopping correctly. In this example we can assume: |