Marrying up counselling and technical support #1

One of the challenges of my job is that customers often do not provide enough data regarding their problems. What they do is describe their problem, and assume that their problem can be solved based on that description. I've witnessed this phenomenon both at my previous company and my current company.

Most of these customers probably never encountered or heard of Eric Raymond's "How to ask questions the smart way".

Most of the time, additional data is required. Often, direct ways of asking customers to provide the data doesn't work. In many cases, I had to ask "Would you please provide additional data/steps, such as, xxxxx" 2-3 times before they responded with the requested data. One of the modules in counselling is psychology and a chapter in psychology deals with behaviour. I believe that I can use operant conditioning to influence customers to provide additional data when they file their case.

Let's see how it goes...