I do a lot of "user interrogation" here, and when I look at a ticket I usually expect
1- a meaningful enough title that the person or group that's responsible can identify it as something they need to be the ones to look at
2- that were you tryin to accomplish?
3- what did you see?
4- what did you do?
5- what did you expect to happen?
6- what really happened?
a quickie put into context:
subject: projector in room 202 not working
body: this morning I was going to show a video from the computer on the projector in 202. the projector was off but when I tried to turn it on using the remote, the projector just beeped and flashed a red light
I rarely need any additional clarifications if the ticket hits all those points. Here anyway, having to track down the reporter and get more answers delays our getting repairs done and leads to additional users being inconvenienced. So I'm always grateful when a ticket contains all the information I need to immediately resolve the problem.
The most important part of that is getting users to report the last two points, what did they expect and what really happened. Users often just answer one or two of those questions, with vague reports like "can't play a video in the library". ("hoboy, where do we start....") A lot of the time they do well and stumble on the last two, instead speculating about what's wrong, and we get reports like "remote in room 202 needs new batteries". Regardless, in my book I always want to know "what did you expect?" because ultimately, #5 is the most important information in the ticket. Users may speculate wildly about what they think is wrong, or give you all sorts of irrelevant information and all the things they tried to fix the problem, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter how much you've done or how much you've fixed, if the user is still having the problem that caused them to put in the ticket in the first place. Frequently we'l get tickets where most of the details they provide are white noise - observations that are unrelated to the problem, things they did to try to resolve the issue that had no chance of helping, and it comes down to #5 being outright wrong. "there's nothing wrong with the phone in that room, you can't dial an outside number from it"
maybe a little OT but hopefully a little helpful nevertheless
