Troubleshooting Guide: Your Team's Problem-Solving Solution

Almost every business faces problems at a certain point in time. These problems often lead to serious interruptions in the smooth functioning of the business. If such problems persist or occur frequently, it needs to be treated. Otherwise, the employees will not work productively and effectively. 

It's important to provide your employees with a proper solution guide. This solution guide is a kind of documentation that helps the employees to solve troubleshooting problems. Let's have a look at the detailed information about this guide. 

What is a troubleshooting guide?

A troubleshooting guide is a properly structured set of guidelines that contains all the usual occurring problems as well as rare problems along with their solutions to make the system function correctly. When any uncertain problem occurs while working, troubleshooting is the best way to know what is the actual problem for the interruption. 

This troubleshooting guide helps the employees to work effectively, and it avoids stopping the work for longer durations. The moment any problem occurs, employees simply look at the guide and solve the problem by following the proper steps. Troubleshooting is very helpful for employees as it helps them to restore the process, system, or product easily and allows them to work in a highly efficient manner. 

What are the benefits of a troubleshooting guide?

If you're wondering why troubleshooting is important, let's run through some benefits.

A troubleshooting guide is a way to solve problems. Its benefits can't be undermined by any company or organization. If you have a business and you aim for its sustainability, then you must focus on the importance of systematized structure and constantly documented guides. 

Here are some of the major benefits of using a troubleshooting guide.

• It will help you to no longer rely on memory and experience for troubleshooting. 
• It will avoid incompetency in the customer's eyes. 
• The documentation describes technically so that it enables the readers to understand what steps need to be followed. 
• Worded documentation improves the quick recovery of problems. Even if you do not remember the steps or process for troubleshooting, you can get immediate help from this well-illustrated guide. 
• It is also good to record the problems and its solution so that whenever it happens another time, you can solve them in the same way. 
• Just have a look at the Troubleshooting guide examples and see how these guides improve the effectiveness of the work and so quickly it solves any technical problems. 
• This guide is mainly the recording and maintenance of the significant activities and steps you follow when troubleshooting problems or any other problem exist. 
• It allows the employees to work collaboratively and solve any customer-oriented or internal troubleshooting problems.
• It guides any new member or employee in the business to overcome any technical issue within a second. 
• A properly structured and well-written documentation provides crucial insights and ensures the utmost quality of work. 
• With the improved technicality and efficiency of the team, customer services improve significantly. And this makes them trust and rely on the company and its brands. 
• This prevents the usage of help desk tickets. 
• It also gives the employees a feeling of self-worth, and it becomes easier for them to deal with happy customers. 

How to write a troubleshooting guide

To sustain in this fast-changing world of businesses, it becomes important for customer help desks to have strong and interactive backing facilities that help them to deliver their best services to customers. Therefore, it is important to have a guide that enables the team to learn new technical things and work effectively. However, creating troubleshooting guides from the scratches can be a little arduous and can need robust technical strength. 

Moreover, you can follow the below-given steps to write a troubleshooting guide. 

1. ‍Prepare a common list: Make a list of all common troubleshooting problems that you or your team have addressed before. 

2. Determine the issue: If you see any error code showing on the screen or any user experience-based issues, such as shutting down a computer unexpectedly, you must know the cause of this issue in detail. Mark all the problems in the specific categories so that it becomes easy to map out meaningful insights for the customer's journey. 

3. Use appropriate questions and different user responses: When you identify the core problem, you can easily deal with your customer by asking them the right set of questions and helping them to solve the issue quickly. And these questions must be added to the Troubleshooting chart, which enables everyone to resolve the problems instantly without any delay. 

Choosing the right set of questions, such as if your settings are correct? What type of network do they use? What's the validity of the internet plan? Will help customers to get the best services. Better user responses can lead the agents to deal with the problem in the best effective way. The agents can easily ask the appropriate questions to customers and auto-traverse the information from backend servers and resolve the issue quickly and easily. 

4. Embed processes and resources: In the troubleshooting guide, following multiple steps can be exhausting and disruptive sometimes. Going back and forth in the guide may disrupt the flow of agents. It's helpful to focus on structure, add relevant steps one-by-one, and use warning tips or resources. This way, users will find it easy to follow the guide and get help from it. 

5. Add visual instructions Guiding with visual support can help the agents to derive solutions most effectively. Adding images of step-to-step processes reduces the chance of agent errors and enhances the team efficiency with better customer service. You must add the relevant screenshots of the error and its solution to make it more effective. 

6. Enable self-service: In today's world, a large population of people is now interested and comfortable with using digital channels like texting and self-service. Thus, it is good to give the customers an option to troubleshoot the process on their own. This way, the retention rates and satisfaction rates of customers also increase drastically. 

Moreover, before you finalize things, you must give the guide a final touch. Organize the data and information in categories and use appropriate keywords by checking the content. Also, see whether the tips and solutions are registered in the guide correctly or not. 

7. Give it a test: Now that you have created the guide properly, it's time for you to run a test. Give these step-by-step guides to your employees and provide them with certain situations and ask them to solve them. If they resolve those situations easily and quickly with the help of a troubleshooting guide, then know that you created the perfect one. 

How to beef up your troubleshooting guide 

The following are the ways by which you can improve the troubleshooting guide. 

1. Know Your Device And Its Problems: The better you know your device, the better you can diagnose the problem. So, if you want to know about the problem occurring in your device, first, you must analyze your asset and its performance carefully. 

2. Keep The Process Simple: Do not go into high technical stuff; simply just opt for easy processes and basic shortcuts. Finding a simple solution to any problem is better than using high technical steps. Therefore, always opt for an easy and simple way of solving when it comes to troubleshooting the problems. 

3. Practice Well 

The troubleshooting guide will always be there to help you with the technicalities. Though looking into guides and then following them may make the process a little slow or boring, you can improve your troubleshooting skill by knowing the processes in mind. But this can only happen if you have practiced the steps many times. So, practice more, and you will remember the steps easily. This way, you can beef up the troubleshooting guide and make it more interesting to follow. 

4. ‍Take advantage of generators or automation: To create your troubleshooting guide easily and quickly, you can make use of guide automation — like Scribe.

Scribe is a step-by-step guide generator that captures your screen to document your processes for you. Like this one:

Scribes are easy to share, embed and update. Making it easier than ever to build and socialize guides that outline your processes, and help you identify bugs and catch issues.

{{banner-default="/banner-ads"}}

Scribe’s newest feature, Pages, lets you organize Scribes with other text, media, and more. Now you can create fully-fledged process documentation in half the time with the help of Scribe. 

Is it time to build a troubleshooting guide?

Many companies and businesses make use troubleshooting guides to help their customers from backend servers effectively.

This simultaneously increases the customer's satisfaction and the agent's problem-solving abilities. The troubleshooting guide provides a unified dashboard for the customer to give their valuable information and problems that are needed to be solved instantly. Therefore, these things make troubleshooting guides highly efficient and required items in the business.