Providing support of any kind a to a customer can be a challenge. Providing IT support remotely is particularly hard though. What makes it hard is that you have no way of judging the IT knowledge level of the person you are supporting. They could be as IT literate as you are, or they could be as bad as your 70 year old grandma who thinks a computer virus is an infection passed to humans by computers. Some times the IT literate ones can be more of a problem than the novice users, the novice users will at least listen to what you tell them to do where as the ones that consider themselves pro’s will mix your advice with their own feelings on how it should work.
If you are unable to get remote access to the computer you are supporting then you have to learn how to modulate your instructions and advice to the user in a way that they will understand. It’s no good just treating everyone the same, a savvy IT user will not take too kindly to instructions for dummies. While a novice will not grasp the more detailed instructions given to advnanced users. If you want the user to be able to get past their problem then you have to work out the kind of user you are dealing with and give advice at the level they need.
If I am supporting a person I have never dealt with before I tend to assume that they are at a novice standard, this doesn’t mean they have just started using a computer more that they are not at home using them they are the kind of people that think Internet Explorer is the only way to access the Internet (or AOL browser yuck!). You can usually tell with in a few moments of starting the call what kind of user they are, the way they carry out your instructions and the responses they give will indictate if they need their status upgrading. If a user doesn’t understand when you ask them to click on Windows Start menu then there is a good chance that they are going to fall into the novice IT user classification. This kind of user need to be hand held all the way through the solution, if you cant get remote access to help them then you are going to need to be patient and stay on the phone with them. Feeding them information a bit at a time so that they do not get lost or confused as they follow your instructions. You need to remember that what is second nature to you isn’t always the easiest thing to them. When dealing with this kind of user I tend to find it helps to set my mind to work as if I am supporting my mum. My mother is a novice IT user like most of her generation. She has come to them late in life and while she is getting better its at a very slow rate. By thinking I am dealing with my mother I tend to keep my patience a lot longer than I would normally, if im sstruggling to get through I think back to times when I have had to work around problems with her that she doesn’t understand. The thing to remember is that this kind of user is not stupid or dumb, they just don’t understand computers because they don’t need to.
The other end of the scale is the user who is proficient in IT, the instructions for this kind of user don’t need to be broken down as much as they would for a novice user. This kind of user can be given more detail on the steps they are following and about how the system works in general. Just remember not to give them too much information, not because it could negate your own usefulness to them but because if they think they understand the system to will be apt to wonder around on their own trying to fix things and end up causing you more problems that are even harder to fix. There is such a thing as enough knowledge to be dangerous and a person like that can cause some of the most awkward problems to fix.