Troubleshooting Guide

Ah, troubleshooting – the modern-day equivalent of navigating a labyrinth with a blindfold on, while juggling flaming torches. It’s the heroic act of transforming “Why is this happening?” into “Aha, that’s why!”

Yet, even the best detectives can find themselves stumped by the enigmatic errors of the digital realm. Welcome to the world of troubleshooting, where every glitch has a story and every fix is a small victory. Buckle up as we dive into the quirks, challenges, and occasional hilarity that come with the territory of tech problem-solving.

Why is troubleshooting challenging?

Mastering the art of troubleshooting is like taming a wild beast – it’s complex and demanding, requiring deep product knowledge and razor-sharp analytical thinking. It’s an arena where experience, patience, and persistence are your best allies in the quest to pinpoint and resolve issues. To top it off, you need to wield diagnostic tools with finesse, adapt to ever-changing scenarios, and communicate effectively to collaborate with others. These elements make troubleshooting a tough nut to crack. That’s where a good troubleshooting guide comes in handy, serving as a trusted map for those daring enough to navigate these technical jungles.

What is a troubleshooting guide?

A troubleshooting guide is your trusty compass in the chaotic world of tech support. These guides help users identify and resolve problems with a product, system, or process by offering step-by-step instructions to diagnose issues, uncover their causes, and implement solutions. They are indispensable tools for technical support, customer service, and maintenance teams, empowering users to tackle common problems independently without needing to call in the experts.

Who needs a troubleshooting guide?

A troubleshooting guide is a lifesaver for anyone responsible for identifying and resolving problems, including technical support staff, IT professionals, engineers, maintenance personnel, and end-users. It can also be invaluable for individuals who are less familiar with a particular system or device, providing them with step-by-step instructions to diagnose and fix issues without the help of subject matter experts.

What types of troubleshooting guides are out there?

There are multiple types of troubleshooting guides in use.

• Step-by-Step Guides: Detailed, sequential instructions that walk users through the process of identifying and resolving a problem.
• Flowcharts: Visual diagrams that map out the troubleshooting process, helping users make decisions based on symptoms and outcomes.
• Checklists: Lists of potential problems and solutions that users can check off as they go through the troubleshooting process.
• Diagnostic Tools and Software Guides: Instructions on using specific diagnostic tools or software applications to identify and fix issues.
• FAQs and Knowledge Bases: Collections of frequently asked questions and their answers, often organized in a searchable database.
• Interactive Troubleshooting Guides: These are built using interactive decision trees to guide users through the troubleshooting procedure interactively based on their inputs.
• Video Tutorials: Visual guides that demonstrate the troubleshooting process, making it easier for users to follow along.
• User Manuals and Technical Documentation: Comprehensive documents that include troubleshooting sections to address common problems and their solutions.

What challenges are faced by technical support organizations?

One of the primary challenges for technical support organizations is to have the entire team consistently and accurately troubleshoot customer issues. Enterprises aim to meet this goal while dealing with agent attrition and relying on training and conventional knowledge bases. However,

• Knowledge acquired during training is hard to retain, despite being helpful.
• Knowledgebase articles are not the ideal means of accessing such information due to:
  • Search Problem
    • Keyword search results in multiple matching snippets
    • Agents spend time refining search phrases to get to the right article
    • Agents spend time reviewing snippets, reviewing multiple articles to find the right one.
  • Traversal Problem
    • Comprehensive articles may be intimidating – leading L1 agents to escalate tickets
    • Articles contain non-linear information expressed linearly
    • Agents have to hop through sections of the articles, while interacting with customers
  • Documentation Problem
    • Agents have to summarize the steps they went through to resolve customer issue
    • Such documentation is subjective, unstructured, inconsistent & takes up time
    • If L2 agent takes a call, the new agent may make the customer repeat some of what the L1 agent did, costing time and customer satisfaction.

How do these challenges impact call center metrics?

• Agents spend significant time viewing/reading incorrect articles.
• Viewing inappropriate articles skews knowledgebase usage statistics.
• Skewed statistics make it harder for the Knowledge Management team to identify truly useful articles.
• After multiple attempts, finding the right article can be challenging for agents.
• Non-linear process information in articles requires agents to navigate different sections based on the customer situation, adding to the difficulty.
• Agents often gravitate towards solving issues they are familiar with and readily escalating other tickets to maintain their AHT while handling the expected number of tickets per month. This reduces FCR, thereby increasing cost and reducing CSAT from customers who can’t get their issues resolved during first contact.
• After call summary created by Agents on how they addressed (or attempted to address) the customer issue, is often minimal, non-standard, and subject to such Agent’s language skills, knowledge, and thoroughness.
• Such documentation often doesn’t help L2 Agents when issues are escalated, forcing such L2 Agents to make the customer repeat steps they already went through with L1 Agent, further increasing AHT and reducing CSAT from such customers.

How can technical support teams overcome these challenges?

What are interactive troubleshooting guides?

Interactive troubleshooting guides are a specific type of digital tool designed to facilitate interactive troubleshooting and problem-solving processes. Yonyx offers a platform that enables the creation of these guides, which are tailored to help users diagnose and resolve technical issues efficiently.

Key features of these guides include:

Interactive Design: These troubleshooting guides allow users to interactively navigate from symptoms to underlying root cause. Users select options or answer questions presented in each step to get to the next step.

Rich Content Support: Guides often include visual aids such as photos, screenshots, animated gifs, or embedded videos to enhance understanding and clarity.

Customizable Content: These guides are created by subject matter experts for specific products, systems, or services. This customization ensures relevance and accuracy in troubleshooting instructions.

Structured Troubleshooting Process: The guides provide a structured approach to troubleshooting, guiding users through a logical sequence of steps to identify and resolve issues systematically.

Integration Capabilities: Yonyx guides can integrate with other systems or platforms, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, ZOHO, Google Sheets or customer support portals or knowledge bases, to provide seamless access to troubleshooting resources.

Analytics and Feedback: These guides offer cumulative traversal analytics to track user interactions and feedback, helping organizations continuously improve the effectiveness of their troubleshooting guides.

How do interactive troubleshooting guides compare with knowledge base articles?

Interactive troubleshooting guides and knowledge base articles both aim to help users solve problems but differ in approach and functionality. Interactive troubleshooting guides provide a dynamic, step-by-step process tailored to user input, with visual and multimedia information in each step, making them ideal for complex troubleshooting processes. In contrast, knowledge base articles offer static, text-based content that users search and browse, providing general information, linear process steps and documentation.

1. Fewer Starting Points: Instead of thousands of articles, Troubleshooting Guides are organized to begin with a few starting points. These starting points may include call drivers and problem symptoms.
2. Interactive traversal: Makes it easier for Agents to go through a Troubleshooting Guide vs. hopping through relevant parts of a knowledge base article when seeking a solution to the customer issue.
   • Thus, when an Agent looks for guides relevant for USA and Sony – this guide would appear in the filtered list.
3. Symptom to root cause, Hierarchical Guides: Subject matter experts (SMEs) create troubleshooting guides that Agents can follow interactively, starting from symptoms to underlying root cause and corresponding solution. Such guides can often be very complex and may involve common sub-processes across multiple guides. Yonyx platform enables creation of such complex guides with an intuitive and visual flowchart driven tool.
4. Documentation The documentation of steps traversed through a guide automatically adds to CRM ticket fields. This standardized documentation also includes analytics information about the amount of time spent by a Agent in each step of the process.
5. L2 Agents can resume from the last step of L1 Agents if they choose to.
6. Less Escalation, as Agents simply must choose a guide from a small number of topics and then follow along interactively.

How such guides help users identify root causes and solutions?

Interactive troubleshooting guides are authored by subject matter experts (SMEs). Each guide begins with a symptom that corresponds to a common customer call driver. A call driver is a frequently encountered issue that customers report in response to the initial query, “How can I help you?”

Tech support agents select a guide based on the symptom or call driver and follow it interactively. At each step, they ask the customer a follow-up question and choose an option based on the customer’s response. This process helps agents identify the root cause and corresponding solution. These guides can be very complex and often include common sub-processes used across multiple guides. The Yonyx platform facilitates the creation of such guides using an intuitive, visual flowchart-driven tool.

How is complexity of troubleshooting procedure managed?

Individual guides can be extremely complex, with thousands of nodes, and may redirect users from one guide to another. Authors can break down a complex troubleshooting process into sub-processes, allowing users to transition from a parent process to a sub-process and then return to the parent process at the same node. Even with a CRM Data Connector, this feature enables placing data fields read from the CRM into placeholders for the parent guide and passing them on to the sub-process guide. Any updates to placeholders made in the sub-process guides pass back to the parent guide.. This handoff supports unlimited levels of nesting, ensuring seamless transitions between parent and child guides while maintaining the integrity of placeholder values in both directions.

How can analytics data improve troubleshooting guides?

Cumulative traversal analytics display the total number of visits by all users to each node in a guide. This allows authors (SMEs) to assess the effectiveness of each troubleshooting step and, if necessary, reorder them to present the more effective solutions earlier in the sequence.

As shown in the image above, Step 1 in this troubleshooting process is clearly less effective, as 90 out of 100 users answered “No” to the question, “Issue resolved?” In contrast, Step 2 is more effective, with only 40 out of 90 users responding “No” to the same question.

Therefore, moving Step 2 up in the sequence would resolve more customers’ issues more quickly, thereby decreasing the average handling time (AHT) and simultaneously improving customer satisfaction (CSAT).

Yonyx platform also enables authors (SMEs) to compare cumulative analytics data across two date ranges. This allows authors to understand the impact of any changes they make. For example, instead of reordering steps 1 and 2, an author may choose to add details to Step 1. They can then measure the impact of this change by running Differential Analytics. By comparing the data from before and after the modification, authors can determine if more users are taking the desired paths.

Customer self service guides with hidden paths for agents.

Troubleshooting guides for customer self-service can be structured so that certain sections are accessible to anonymous end customers, while more advanced parts are restricted to internal users, such as call center agents.