Getting Help: Guides For Getting IT Help
How to reach us, what to say, and what happens after you do.
In short: a fast fix starts with telling us the job you were doing, the result you got, the error message as it appears, and how many people it reaches. Phone us when the whole office is stopped and use a ticket for the rest.
These guides cover getting IT help for people who do not work in IT. No jargon that is not explained, no step that needs a password you do not have, and no assumption that you already know the answer.
If a guide does not match what you are seeing, that is our problem rather than yours. Call 678-374-4352 and tell us, and we will fix the guide as well as the fault.
Start Here If You Are New
This section covers the mechanics of getting help. Not what is broken, but how to tell us about it so it gets fixed quickly and does not need three rounds of questions first.
The single most useful thing to know is the difference between calling and raising a ticket. Anything that has stopped the whole office, anything involving security, and anything with a deadline tonight should be a phone call to 678-374-4352. Everything else is better as a ticket, because a ticket carries a written history that a phone call does not.
Next in importance are the four facts covered below: your task at the time, what the screen did instead, the error as written, and anyone else hit by it. Supplying them up front removes most follow-up questions before they are asked.
Read what to include in a support request first. It takes two minutes and it will save you a good deal more than that.
The Guides In This Section
Report an IT outage covers what counts as an outage, the thirty second check that tells you whether it is one, and what to say in the first sentence.
What happens after you open a ticket explains the stages a ticket goes through, how priority is actually decided, and why one issue per ticket matters.
When to call out of hours gives clear triggers so you are not left guessing at seven in the evening about whether something can wait.
What to include in a support request is the short version of everything above and the one to bookmark.
Help desk or security line tells you which route to take when something feels like it might be a security problem.
Why The Detail You Give Changes The Outcome
Getting help quickly is largely a function of how much guesswork we have to do first, and most of that guesswork is avoidable.
Vague tickets cost the most time. A ticket reading no internet leaves us asking which machine, whether colleagues are hit too and what exactly fails, and each answer waits on the next reply. Step away from your desk mid-thread and a fix that should take minutes stretches across a whole day.
Compare a ticket that says: the shared drive will not open on my laptop, the message reads network path not found, it was fine yesterday, and a colleague can reach it. That one is picked up right away, since nothing is missing.
One issue, one person, two very different outcomes. That gap is the case for the four facts.
The exact error message matters more than anything else in that list. Paraphrasing loses the code that identifies the fault.
What We Do At Our End
Knowing the shape of the response makes it easier to judge when to chase and when to wait.
Every ticket is logged and acknowledged. An engineer reads it, sets a priority based on business impact rather than wording, and either starts work or asks the questions needed to start. You will hear something either way rather than sitting in silence.
Priority is about how many people are stopped and what is at risk. Whole office beats one person. Client data and money beat inconvenience. Anything with a security dimension goes to the front regardless of when it arrived.
Tickets close when you agree they are resolved, not when we think so. If the same thing comes back, reply to the closed ticket rather than starting a new one, because the history travels with it and patterns become visible.
Recurring problems reported as recurring get fixed at the cause. Reported separately, they get fixed at the symptom three times.
Related Sections And The Number To Keep
If your issue is a phone, go to Phones and VoIP. If it is email, Email and Microsoft 365. If it is a password or a login, Accounts and passwords. If anything about it feels like a security problem, go straight to Security and phishing and call rather than read.
Store 678-374-4352 in a place you can reach even if every computer in the office is offline. A phone contact, a note in a wallet, a sign by the reception desk. Outages have a habit of taking the thing you would have looked the number up on.
The full index of guides is on the Knowledge Base home page.
For a general framework on incident reporting and response that underpins how most managed service desks work, see the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.
A Getting Help Checklist To Keep By The Desk
Everything in this section, compressed into ten lines.
- Whole office stopped? Call, do not raise a ticket.
- Anything security related? Call and press option 1, any hour.
- One person with a workaround? A ticket is right.
- One issue per ticket, always.
- Say what you were doing and what happened instead.
- Paste the exact error rather than paraphrasing it.
- Say who else is affected. It is the most useful line you can write.
- List any fixes you attempted, which saves us trying them twice.
- Reply to the existing ticket rather than starting a new one.
- Keep 678-374-4352 somewhere that does not need a computer.
Getting help well is a two minute skill that saves hours across a year.
Getting Help In Your Industry
What we prioritize depends on what stopping costs you, so tell us.
Law firms. Deadlines change everything. Say in the first line if something blocks a filing or a hearing today, because a request that reads like any other request will be treated like any other request.
Distribution and logistics. Say how many people and which function. Order entry down for the desk is a completely different ticket from one person with an odd screen, even when the underlying fault is the same.
Manufacturing. Tell us if production is affected. A stopped line goes ahead of an office annoyance every time, so mention it rather than leaving us to guess.
None of this is bureaucracy. It simply lets us put your most urgent problem at the top of the pile. Call 678-374-4352.
Using This Section With A New Hire
Getting help well is a skill, and it is one of the few IT skills worth teaching deliberately on somebody’s first day rather than leaving them to work out.
The version that works is short. Show them where the number is. Explain the difference between calling and raising a ticket. Walk them through the four facts, and tell them plainly that nobody is ever criticized for asking. Ten minutes on day one saves that person weeks of hesitation over the following year.
The part people underestimate is permission. New hires routinely sit with a broken thing for two days because they do not want to be a nuisance, and then apologize when they finally report it. Telling somebody explicitly that getting help early is the expected behavior is worth more than any documentation.
It is also worth telling them what is not their problem. A slow machine is not something to put up with. Neither is a printer that needs coaxing every few days. A password that has to be reset every month is a fault, not a routine. People who have never been told this assume everything is like this everywhere.
If you are onboarding several people, send them this section rather than explaining it each time.
The Four Facts, And Why Each One Matters
Every guide in this section reduces to the same four facts, so it is worth understanding what each one actually does.
What you were doing. This gives context. The same error means different things depending on whether you were opening a file, printing, or signing in. Without it we are diagnosing a symptom with no situation attached.
What happened instead. This is the observable fact. Not your theory about the cause, which is often wrong in an interesting way, but what the screen actually did. A description of what you think went wrong sends us in the wrong direction more often than it helps.
The exact error. Error text usually contains a code or a specific phrase that identifies the fault precisely. Paraphrasing loses exactly the part that matters. A screenshot is ideal because it also captures what else was on the screen.
Who else is affected. This is the single most valuable line, because it splits every problem in half. One person means the device, the account or the settings. Everyone means the network, the server or a service, and there is no point looking at your machine at all.
Getting help quickly is almost entirely a function of how quickly somebody can answer those four.
What Happens On Our Side, In Order
Knowing the sequence makes waiting easier and stops the second and third chase.
A ticket is logged and acknowledged automatically, so you have a reference immediately. An engineer reads it, decides priority on business impact rather than tone, and either starts work or asks the specific questions needed to start. You hear something either way.
For a phone call about an outage the order is different. We confirm scope first, meaning how many people and which services, then work through the shared infrastructure in order of blast radius. Connectivity, then the server or cloud service, then the application. Most resolve at one of the first two.
Throughout, you get told what we know rather than being left in silence until there is a fix. An early message saying we can see it and we are working on the connection is more useful than a perfect answer an hour later.
Afterwards, anything significant gets a short written explanation of what happened and what changed so it does not repeat. That document matters more than people expect, particularly if an insurer or a client ever asks.
And if the cause sits with a third party, a carrier or a cloud provider, we will say so plainly along with whatever they have told us rather than pretending to control something we do not.
When To Use The Getting Help Guides In This Section
Getting help is not one activity, and the guides in this section cover four distinct situations. Knowing which one you are in tells you which guide to open and, more importantly, whether getting help means picking up the phone or writing something down.
The first situation is a shared service that has stopped. Getting help here means calling, immediately, and the outage guide covers what to say. The second is a single problem affecting only you. Getting help here means a well written ticket, and the ticket guides cover what to include.
The third is uncertainty about timing. It is seven in the evening, something is wrong, and you cannot decide whether getting help tonight is proportionate. The out of hours guide gives you clear triggers so you are not weighing it up alone.
The fourth is anything with a security dimension, where getting help is unconditional and immediate regardless of the hour or your level of certainty.
What all four have in common is that getting help early is always cheaper than getting help late. The most expensive tickets we receive are the ones that begin with the sentence this has been happening for a couple of weeks.
People delay for understandable reasons. They do not want to look foolish, they assume somebody else has reported it, or they have decided it is not important enough. All three are wrong more often than they are right, and none of them are how we would like anybody to feel about getting help from us.
So the standing instruction is simple. If something is wrong, tell us. If you are not sure whether it is worth mentioning, mention it. If you are not sure whether it is urgent, say that you are not sure, and we will decide. Getting help should never involve a judgment call about whether you are allowed to.
And if the systems you would normally use for getting help are the ones that are down, that is exactly why the number is worth keeping somewhere that does not need a computer. 678-374-4352.
Questions About Getting IT Help
Anyone at a client business. They assume no IT background.
Call 678-374-4352. Software changes and we would rather fix the guide.
Yes. Ask and we will send a version you can hand to a new hire.
Call 678-374-4352. For a security emergency, press option 1; that line is answered 24/7 with a response within thirty minutes. The help desk is open Monday to Friday, 8 AM to 5 PM Eastern.