How To Ask For Help

Whether you are dealing with technical support, customer service or a casual acquaintance, there are some ways to ask for help that are more effective than others.

Technical support and customer service people are paid to assist you. However they can only work with the information that they are given.

Unless you believe that everyone has wonderful ESP skills then you need to help yourself as well.

If you are having a problem take a moment to describe it.

Are you sure it’s a problem? (This may seem like an odd question, but if you were to switch from a PC to a Mac you’d probably have lots of “issues” related to things working “differently”, rather than actually being broken per se.)

The more information you can give someone the more likely the first answer is going to be helpful.

It’s in our interest to help you solve your problem as quickly as possible.

Imagine if you were asking a friend for a recommendation for a restaurant.

If you asked the very open and vague question:

Can you recommend a restaurant?

You aren’t giving your friend much to work with and any recommendation they give you is going to be really general.

How many people are going to be eating?
Is it a romantic dinner for two or a quick bite to eat with a friend?
Do you have budget limitations?
etc., etc.,

Now imagine the difference a more precise question would get:

Can you recommend a cosy restaurant for a romantic dinner? It’s our anniversary and I want to do something really special.

With hosting companies’ support it’s pretty much the same.

The more information you can give our staff when you contact us the faster we’ll be able to answer your query and hopefully resolve it.

Basic things you can include:

• the domain name
• describe the problem including any error messages that you get
• can you give us a link to a page where we can see the problem?

You should also check that the problem is related to a service we provide.

Seriously.

If you cannot view ANY sites on the internet from your home or office then we won’t be able to help you.

We are not Google (or MSN or Yahoo!) and have no control over how Google indexes websites. We cannot and will not offer SEO services.

If you have a question we can only do our best to answer it. We cannot work miracles and while I think our customer service staff do a good job, they cannot read minds.