Marketers: Help Your IT Help You

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Your Frustration
Errors, glitches, failures and crashes are going to happen and they are frustrating. This is especially true when you’re working on a web site project with your IT Department or other techies. Think about it: you’re trying to get the new or updated web site project finished so you can move on to other things and you find features which don’t work, pages which won’t load, images missing … it can be very frustrating.

Then, when you report problems to your techies, they sometimes seem to drag their feet and don’t fix things right away. Worse is when they tell you they don’t see a problem on their end – and you’re looking at the problem on your screen.

Many times, these frustrations can be eliminated, or at least minimized, by better communication. You might be thinking to yourself, “But, I’m in the communication business. Surely I don’t need to improve.” While it’s true you’re in the communication business and in other areas of your life you are brilliant in this area, when it comes to talking to IT people you might not be “all that.”

Let’s look at it from the IT side.
Your techie counterparts are working in their darkened cubicles, hacking out code at a phenomenal rate. They are working hard to finish your web site by the deadline because they want to do a good job for you – and because they have other projects waiting in the wings with deadlines of their own.

All of the sudden they get an email (or phone call):

• “The site is down.”
• “Such-and-such page isn’t working.”
• “Your page crashed.”

They might sound annoyed when responding to you. This is because they most likely tested whatever it is giving you a problem at least a dozen times during development before they asked you to check it out. Also, being tech types, they lean towards linear thinking. They look at or listen to your message and a bunch of questions come to mind.  They sigh and think, “Here we go again” because they tell people (not just you) over and over they need more information if they are going to efficiently and accurately help you.

Here are some tips which you can use to help you better communicate your way through technical issues when working on a web project with your IT people. These are also quite handy to use when working through any tech support-related issue.

1. Be Descriptive – Don’t skimp on the details. Think of the “W’s.”
   One of the things they will have to do is reproduce the error to see what caused it. The more information you can give them the easier it will be:
   1. Who – of course is you. Is anyone else having the same problem? Ask around if you don’t know.
   2. What – The most important whats when troubleshooting web site issues are: What Operating System is your computer running? And, what web browser are you using and what version is it? If you can’t answer those, ask your IT people how to find out which you are using. Other important whats: What were you doing? What did you click on? What did you enter in the box?
   3. Where – What was the address of the web page you were on? Where was the link you clicked on?
   4. When – About what time did this happen? How long did it take from click to error?
   5. How – Is up to the IT folks to figure out.
2. Copy and Paste – If you get an error message either print it or copy and paste the message text into an email.
3. Use Screen Print – Sometimes copy and paste doesn’t cut it. In those cases, a screen print will work better. Keep in mind, you can’t do this if you’re troubleshooting a total operating system crash. Print screen creates an image of whatever is showing on the monitor you can paste into a file and email.
   Here’s how to do it:
   1. Keep the window with the error showing
   2. Hold the “ALT” key on the computer’s keyboard and hit the button labeled “PrtScn”.
   3. The “PrtScn” button is usually near the number pad on the upper left part of the keyboard.
   4. Open word or an image editing application
   5. Paste into a new document or image file.
   6. Save the file.
   7. Email the file.

While there is such a thing as “too much information,” in my opinion it’s better err on the side of giving too much than not enough. Also, be prepared to answer questions because they will arise. If you don’t understand some technical jargon in the questions don’t be afraid to ask for clarification.

Feel free to share …

If you’re a tech-type: what tips do you have for others who report problems with projects you’re working on.

If you’re a non tech-type: what kinds of things have you learned to help others communicate better with their technical people?

photo credit: mccun934

Tags: browsers, in-house, sem, support