By Michael Miller, RPSGT

After a recent conversation with a colleague, who is a technical support specialist, I felt that this week’s tech tip of the week should be focused on the topic of troubleshooting. I asked to him to give me a percentage value for the usual type of technical support calls that he receives. His response was surprising to me. He informed me that 10% of technical support phone calls that he receives were related to sensor failures, 10% were associated to computer problems, 10% were linked to legitimate system software issues, 10% were connected to actual hardware malfunctions, and 60% of the calls that he fields were correlated with user error. I asked him to elaborate on the user error calls that made up more than half of his of his work load. He further explained that a majority of these calls came from new users of the equipment which was to be expected during the acclimation period of a new system. (more…)