You are often the only part of IT a person ever speaks to. How you communicate becomes, for them, what the whole department is like.
On the phone
- Open with the Help Desk and your first name — people relax when they know who they are talking to.
- Slow down when giving instructions. What is muscle memory to you is unfamiliar to them.
- Say what you are doing during silences. Dead air on a call feels like being abandoned.
- Confirm the fix before closing: “Can you try it now while I'm here?”
- Say what happens next, even when the answer is “nothing, you're all set.”
In writing
- 1
Lead with the answer
Not the history of the investigation.
- 2
One idea per paragraph
Dense blocks do not get read.
- 3
Number anything with steps
People follow numbered lists and skim prose.
- 4
Bold the single action you need from them
If you need something, make it impossible to miss.
- 5
Close with what happens next
Every message should answer “so what now?”
The jargon problem
- Instead of “clear your cache”
- “Clear your browsing history — I'll walk you through where that is.”
- Instead of “it's a DNS issue”
- “Your computer is having trouble finding that site. I'm looking into it.”
- Instead of “escalating to tier 2”
- “I'm passing this to the team that handles this system, with everything we've found.”
- Instead of “authenticate”
- “Sign in.”