IT Communication Skills

Part I: Understanding Customer Problems
In this section you will be given a series of problems presented as a customer might describe them. For each scenario explain what you think the underlying technical problem may be and why. Remember that this assessment is about communication so be as clear and thorough as possible.

1. The morning after a thunderstorm Liz calls you and states that her computer is not working today. You ask her some additional questions and she explains that it’s making a “funny beeping sound” and nothing comes up on the monitor when she presses the power button.

2. Larry, a salesperson with a laptop computer, calls the helpdesk one day and explains that he can’t see anything on his screen anymore! After some open ended questioning you find out he gave a sales presentation to a customer yesterday afternoon and couldn’t get his projector to work at first but one of the other people in the meeting was able to do something to make it work.

3. Linda, a marketing executive, is has called the helpdesk asking if the network is down because she is printing a document but it never shows up at the printer. You have not received any calls from other users about network or printing problems. You have several printers scattered around the office and all users have all printers installed on their systems.

4. Jorge, a new employee, calls the helpdesk and wants to know why the company requires passwords be changed every 45 days, passwords cannot be reused for 2 years, must contain letters, numbers and symbols, and be more than 8 characters long. He seems quite upset with the password policy and is complaining about having to remember something so confusing.

5. Shauna calls one afternoon and says that her printouts don’t look very good. After asking some more questions she explains that they are not very dark, have some streaks and some white spots on them.

IT Communication Skills - Spring 2010

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