How do you reduce repetitive IT support questions?

Iove writing documentation that people don't read. At least the support team I can force to read it. Users... When they need help because they can't read the step by step instructions... Sigh...

"I'm not a computer person!"

Have you tried replacing users with AI ? (Playing on the old „have you tried turning it off and on again?“) Can’t be worse than „naturally dumb“.

Regarding Self-Service Password Reset , my recommendation is to make it an IT policy to not reset passwords over the phone, once SSPR is in place. If you need a process users can follow when SSPR isn’t working, then update your over-the-phone password reset policy to make that method slower, more difficult, and more secure. I.e., require them to complete an identity verification process that involves ID scanning and facial recognition. Adding friction to password resets over the phone will make your users choose to use SSPR next time.

"I need help setting up for a meeting" "Oh, I can show you how to do that" "Can you just do it for me, im not good with computers" ... its literally plugging an hdmi cable to your computer and clicking a link in your email.... do you not have any electronics at home?

Yep, I share the KB, its usually the same problem over and over with some people, and when they come back with "it still isn't working" I ask "at which part?" and I either get no response or it magically works now (likely finally either read the instructions or asked a coworker, 2 things they should have done before contacting IT).

If users don't read try to automate, it seems you haven't done that much in regard of that. Password resets = https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/authentication/concept-sspr-howitworks VPN setup, try to automate as much as possible via Intune or another endpoint manager, Printer connections the same way.

Thankfully when I hear that it's no longer an IT problem, but an HR one. Their entire job revolves around a computer.

I would take the relevant document with me to the user's desk and go through it with them, making sure they did each step themselves following the document. If they had the same issue again I'd ask which step they were on in the document. Sometimes that resulted in the document being improved. Sometimes it resulted in no reply and an eventual "Oh, I figured it out" when I'd follow up. Sometimes it resulted in referring them to trainers.

Automation and self service. - Users can reset their own passwords using the SSPR tool. - VPN config automatically gets deployed together with the VPN software - Printers we don't support. If the printer shows up in the list, it ends for us. There's a special place in hell for printers.

no. that's the life of IT support - this will never change.

make the how-to-doc, share it with them and ask them to follow it. when they say its not working or hitting a blocker, ask them to share the details along with a screenshot then guide them if required. let there be back and forth conversation for the issue so that next time they would rather follow the doc than doing this conversation.

I solved this long ago. first question: "are you following the documentation?" second question: "what step are you on when it is failing?" make them do all the work. don't give them any information. really it's a security risk to hold their hand through everything anyways. unless you 100% know they are who they say they are. which is often never 100% you are silently training them to be self sufficient.

Tape recorder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSAtLkuuNJE

Self service password resets for MS365. Managed deployment of VPN, or something like zerotier/cloudflare tunnels etc cant be scripted and deployed by RMM. Printers are just evil pricks of things, but they can also be scripted and installed using RMM, some of the time.

If there is a source for the answer to their question, send them to the source without fixing the problem.

We have a bot connected to an LLM that has indexed our internal documents and it will prompt the user with relevant helpdesk documents while they are creating a ticket. It asks if this solved their problem and if they say yes, the ticket is not created. It actually works reasonably well and has even found me an answer sometimes (I work on infrastructure, not desktops, so I don't know every desktop answer). We're using Glean for the internal docs search, you can use others of course. One important thing with Glean is to constrain the search to the documentation system. If you let it index everything including helpdesk tickets, internal chat, etc, and don't constrain the answer, it will find many instances of people asking question but no answers. We also have a "fix it yourself" tool that we push to everyone's machine along with self-service software installation. So if your machine is a bit broken, you run this and it fixes common config problems. It works enough that it's worth keeping up to date - we had to write this ourselves, but it means one senior tech wrote the tool rather than a dozen junior techs spending their day remote-ing into user laptops to fix it themselves. The self-service for software will also fix a lot of software installation problems - it avoids "hey install WonderSprocket on my machine!" problems, and also "WonderSprocket isn't working!" problems because the user is encouraged to use the self service to uninstall and reinstall the app (which implicitly upgrades to the latest version, too).

Read a document that thoroughly describes and solves your problem? Why, when it's easier to call HD. Nothing works. I've been in IT for 20 years. No amount of education, documents, training, you name it will ever work. It's easier to dial a number or send an email something is not working, shift the problem to someone else, then to try and fix or set it up yourself.

That's the neat part, you don't. My best piece of advice, forget all you know about computers, networks, DNS, VLANs, all that useless bullshit. This is a customer service job. Work on them soft skills. In some environments, they seem to be the only thing that matters.

Easy as hell, force them to create a ticked and choose from predefined options. When a solution exists show the step by step manual. Do not allow them to make tickets where a standard solution for exists. When contacting the customer and they fooled the system point them back to the solution wizard and hang up the phone.

Write better software!

A few years ago we ran a "Tech Tips" campaign using funny, meme-style posters hung in break areas and coffee stations. It got users engaged and helped reduce repetitive simple questions.

You make the process easier, that's a sign of "tunnel vision" and thinking that users don't pay attention but I find it to be unnecessary complexity in a process (e.g. when a user needs to reset the password, can they actually just type "password reset" somewhere and end up in the right place?) Your KB articles are too long - everyone hates bullet points (because that's a sign of AI boohoo, cry me a river), but a short 3 item list how to do something will be read, a fifteen page article with screenshots? (1) Too long and (2) see the first point

1: Make sure your documentation is written in a way that end users can understand. Sometimes documentation is too technical and the end user is confused. I know someone who used to show a draft to his teenager and see if they could follow it. If they could, it was strong. 2: People like to be shown how to do things at least once even with documentation present. Take a few minutes to walk someone through the documentation and have them click along. Non-technical people are afraid to click the wrong thing even if there’s screenshots and blinking neon signs pointing to what they should do. After that, be encouraging. I always encourage people that they are able to do it and next time, they can handle it but if they get stuck, we’re here. That hands on, people forward approach is how users get trained to do things for themselves in my experience.

Keep visible KB articles for users low! If they have access to 50 KB's from Reste PW to update Adobe Signature they will use it if you ask them if they tried! If they search for Adobe and get 638 Results over 21 pages starting with "How to Enter Tax for Adobe Licenses in Cambodgia in SAP 7.70" .... Yeah man Nobody will look again not even IT! Simplicity is key