Copy Pasta vs personal responses

Copy/Pasta vs personal responses.

I was mulling over this on the flight home (because I’m a big old nerd) and it fell into the realm of how people get so frustrated when we just paste a link. Now. I know that we often paste links because it really is the right answer, and the users get mad because we’re not being personal. In many cases, they should RTFMRTFM “Read the ‘fine’ material” is a admonishment to read the information before complaining it doesn’t exist or that you weren’t told what to do., but also so should we.

I think the main reason people can’t find the answers when searching isn’t so much that search sucks on .org (it does), but that learning the right terminology to get the right answer takes time. So if we go in assuming the new guys don’t speak the lingo very well, would that change some of our standard responses?

The other factor is that different people learn different ways. I detest video training, my wife loves it. I like clear directions, screenshots if needed, a coworker of mine cannot cope without screenshots for all the things ™. How do we take into account different learning methods when triaging support?