What do you wish your clients knew before calling you?

What do you wish your clients knew before calling you?

Ali Nasri (Computer Specialist, Mac 911 Inc.) gives expert video advice on: What are the top 3 computer problems you see on a daily basis?; What do you wish your clients knew before calling you? and more...

I think the number one thing I want my computer clients to know before calling me would be to be able to explain the problem clearly. Often, clients bring in machines for us to repair and they tell us the symptom of what's wrong with the computer, but they fail to tell us, for example, how the problem started or how they can reproduce that problem. Sometimes just adding one extra sentence, or being really clear on something, would make the repair job a lot easier for because we know exactly where to focus on. Think how to communicate the exact nature of the computer problem. Sometimes it's difficult because that's not the client's job. Obviously, they're not going to have the terminology or the expertise in describing accurately what's happening. Other times, they think that problems are really easy to fix. We'll have people asking to clean their computers. Do you want us to physically clean it? But what they mean is that it's running really slow. They don't know that when the computer's running slow it could be due to a full hard drive, it could be corrupt files, it could be a defective hard drive or it could be other hardware problems that have gone wrong with the computer. Fixing a computer problem is often not very simple.