"My app is not working." "My money has not reached." "The internet is bad." These are the kinds of messages support agents receive all day. None of them tells you what is actually wrong. Your job is to ask the right questions, in the right order, until you know. Employers and training programmes often call this issue identification, and it is tested in interviews with role plays.
Start broad, then narrow down
A simple order of questions works for most problems:
- What exactly happens? "When you open the app, what do you see on the screen?" Ask them to read out any error message word for word.
- What did you expect to happen?
- When did it start? Today, after an update, after changing phone?
- Has it ever worked? If yes, what changed since then?
- Is it only you? Can a family member log in? Does it happen on another network or device?
- What have you already tried? This saves you asking them to repeat steps.
Use open questions (starting with what, when, how) to get the story, and closed questions (with yes or no answers) to confirm details: "So it worked yesterday, and today you see 'session expired'. Is that right?"