In a perfect world, customers would never encounter error codes, connectivity issues or firewall conflicts — but these hiccups are inevitable. And without effective support documentation, even the smallest issue drains team resources. Fortunately, a practical troubleshooting guide helps maintain customer satisfaction and efficient support workflows.

Discover what a troubleshooting guide is and how to make one to enhance your support strategy, promoting your brand image as helpful and customer-centric.

What’s a Troubleshooting Guide?

A troubleshooting guide is a comprehensive product manual that details common issues and their various solutions. These guides are intended to help people solve problems without needing to contact a company’s support team. 

Troubleshooting is all about discovering the symptoms and root cause of an issue yourself, so most guides are created for customers. Service reps may also consult these manuals to walk people through probable causes and help them find solutions.

Troubleshooting guides are often part of a more extensive customer service knowledge base, alongside FAQs, community forums and product documentation.

Why Is Troubleshooting Important?

Software troubleshooting guides are essential tools that empower audiences and create frictionless user experiences. The best manuals enable customers to solve their issues and get back to enjoying your products, leaving them with a positive impression of your organization.

Effective guides are just as valuable for employees. Your help desk staff can use these step-by-step instructions to solve people’s problems faster, saving both company and customer time. These manuals also let support staff hires gather information more efficiently as they ramp up their expertise on your company’s offerings.

Here are the primary benefits of using troubleshooting guides:

• Improved customer satisfaction: Customers can quickly solve issues and go back to enjoying your product. 

• Reduced customer support costs: Encouraging people to explore your knowledge base and solve problems themselves reduces support staff needs.

• Strengthened brand trust: Providing guides that reliably solve users’ problems expresses your expertise, thus fostering trust in your offering.

• Unburdened service teams: Troubleshooting guides reduce help desk tickets, decreasing the weight on your support staff.

• Continued product growth: Monitoring which troubleshooting guides get the most views helps you understand and improve upon common product issues.

• Boosted brand image: Clear, actionable and visually appealing manuals contribute to a polished, customer-focused brand image.

How To Write a Troubleshooting Guide in 6 Steps

To build a foolproof help manual that benefits both customers and internal teams, follow these six steps. 

1. Target Common Issues

Proactively addressing your audience’s pressing questions creates the most valuable guide. To identify the most frequently occurring issues, gather information on how users interact with your products through sources like:

• Support tickets.
• Product reviews.
• Community forums.
• Customer satisfaction surveys.
• Social media reviews.

Understanding the hiccups your standard users face helps you craft thoughtful advice beyond generic responses, demonstrating a genuine commitment to helping people work through frustrating problems.

2. Determine Root Causes

Finding the root cause of an issue is a vital part of the troubleshooting process. Most users are unaware of why complications arise, and helping them understand probable causes empowers them to fix and avoid problems going forward. 

Stating a likely reason for each common problem also sets an authoritative tone while enhancing your audience’s problem-solving abilities. And gathering all probable causes helps your support staff solve issues faster, even if they don’t have extensive product experience.

3. Find the Best Solutions

Next, consider all possible solutions. No matter the problem you’re outlining, start with the troubleshooting basics, listing obvious steps like updating software or restarting a device. Providing the most accessible solutions first lets people try the simplest options before moving on to more complex (and potentially time-consuming and frustrating) processes.

This structure makes for an organized manual, and it also leverages the odds that the easiest solution is the correct one. Customers will more likely encounter a simple issue than a rare, complex one, so directing them to the most obvious answers first means they can likely resolve their problem faster and walk away happy.

4. Create the First Draft

Draft your troubleshooting guide, keeping it clear and concise and maintaining an easy-to-follow structure that progresses logically.

To quickly build an accurate, straightforward guide, you can record the problem-solving process with Scribe. Turn Scribe’s browser extension on before you run through a procedure, and let the tool capture each step, highlighting important details and taking annotated screenshots.

Scribe creates user-friendly process documentation in minutes. Your problem-solving instructions automatically appear in a logical, helpful order because our AI captures the steps as you complete them.

5. Incorporate Visual Examples

Troubleshooting guides and user manuals are more engaging and valuable with visuals like screenshots, diagrams and videos. These additions make a guide more interactive and cater better to those with visual learning styles.

Visuals can also help break down complex concepts into digestible components for easier comprehension. This is helpful to customers solving issues on their own, and it also aids customer service reps who must quickly understand solutions before conveying them to users.

Scribe automatically adds screenshots to troubleshooting guides as you make them. Annotated images have helpful arrows and highlights to draw attention to critical areas, and Scribe automatically redacts sensitive information to protect your team’s privacy.

Plus, when your guide is complete, you can easily edit screenshots and add videos and GIFs, creating a helpful manual in minutes.

6. Gather Feedback and Continuously Improve

Test your troubleshooting guides with a small group of users and employees to gauge quality and ensure accurate problem-solving. This also allows you to measure your manual’s accessibility and ease of use.

Even after you publish a guide, regularly evaluate and update it to maintain accuracy and relevance. Choose a method to gather customer input to monitor the performance of your help material. For instance, users can add comments and reactions to Scribes so you know where information is extra helpful and what you could adjust. You could also embed a feedback form at the end of your guides or schedule a regular guide-auditing survey. 

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Troubleshooting Guide Examples

Let’s examine four real troubleshooting guides that incorporate top-notch best practices. Use these practical manuals to inspire yours and boost your customer support knowledge base.

Microsoft’s Troubleshooting Guide

Key takeaway: Excellent organization

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Microsoft’s troubleshooting hub covers over a dozen broad topics, including issues with Microsoft 365 and Azure, but it avoids confusion because of its outstanding organization. Each category contains subcategories that lead to individual issues.

This straightforward organization system allows customers to quickly zero in on their problems, even when browsing an extensive database filled with hundreds of fixes.

Airtable’s Troubleshooting Guide

Key takeaway: Great visuals and structure

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Airtable’s troubleshooting guide has a straightforward structure that uses practical visuals like GIFs and screenshots to encourage better understanding.

The dynamic accordion-style formatting allows users to expand tips that are relevant to them. This keeps the guide tidy while also increasing interactivity and engagement.

Slack’s Troubleshooting Guide

Key takeaway: Find the root cause quickly

Slack’s troubleshooting guide leads with a table of contents that organizes content by its corresponding error message. This system helps customers match their error to a solution and then click the link to jump to the fix.

After users navigate to their problem, they’ll find several sets of step-by-step instructions depending on browser type and device. This makes it easy to get right to the help they need for their unique circumstances.

Bragg’s Troubleshooting Guide

Key takeaway: Precise instructions

‍Bragg’s guide to troubleshooting device settings during a meeting provides annotated screenshots for every step, ensuring the user doesn’t miss any information. This detailed approach affirms to the user that they’re issue-solving correctly.

Bragg built this actionable guide using Scribe, so achieving precision didn’t take hours of work — it only took a few minutes. The Bragg team simply performed the process, and Scribe’s AI-powered tools wrote out the steps and added screenshots.

To enjoy the same experience, grab our Troubleshooting Guide Template and turn it into personalized, step-by-step instructions with Scribe.

Level Up Your Troubleshooting Guides

Troubleshooting guides are crucial to your customer service strategy, providing your audience with practical fixes and giving your support team a helping hand.

Build an effective, visually appealing guide in minutes with Scribe. Switch on the browser extension, go through your troubleshooting process and instantly generate a targeted, relevant guide.

Sign up for Scribe and start elevating your troubleshooting guides today.