Tech activities · Help desk
Triage a vague help desk ticket and write a clear response
Take a one-line ticket from a frustrated user, use AI to draft the clarifying questions you should ask, set a priority, and write a response that does not sound like a robot.
About 25 minutes. Everything you write stays in your browser.
Real help desk tickets are short, vague, and often written when the user is already frustrated. “Email is broken.” “Computer slow.” “Can’t print.” A good help desk technician asks the right two or three questions before touching anything. AI is useful here because it never gets impatient with a vague ticket. You will not.
Pick a ticket (or use one of ours)
Paste a real ticket you have seen, or pick one of these to work with for the rest of the activity. Pick one. Read it twice.
- “My email isn’t working.”
- “Wifi keeps dropping in the conference room.”
- “The shared drive is gone from my computer since this morning.”
- “Printer says offline. I have a deadline.”
- “Laptop is so slow. Can you fix it before lunch?”
Ask AI for the clarifying questions
Before you do anything technical, you need more information. AI is good at thinking of what you forgot to ask.
You are a senior help desk technician training a new hire. I will give you a one-line ticket. List the clarifying questions the new hire should ask the user before touching the machine. Rules: - Maximum 5 questions. Order them by what would change the diagnosis most. - Each question should be answerable by a non-technical user. Avoid jargon (do not say "DHCP" or "DNS", say "did the wifi name change" or "did anything change today"). - After the questions, list 3 likely root causes ranked from most to least common, in plain English. - Do not propose a fix yet. We are still gathering information. Format: 1. Five clarifying questions, numbered. 2. Three likely root causes, numbered, with one sentence each on what would confirm it. Ticket: [paste the ticket from step 1]
Save the questions and likely causes
Read what the AI gave you. Save it. You will reference it in step 5 when you write the response.
Set a priority
Help desks use priority levels (P1, P2, P3, P4 or High/Medium/Low) to decide what to work on first. Most ticketing systems make you set one before you respond. AI can help you justify the call, but you decide.
You are training a new help desk hire on triage. I will give you a ticket and the likely causes. Suggest a priority level using this scale: - P1 (High): one or more users completely cannot work, or the issue affects revenue, safety, or a deadline within 4 hours. - P2 (Medium): one user is significantly slowed down. Workaround exists. - P3 (Low): inconvenience or cosmetic. Can wait until tomorrow. Rules: - Pick one priority. Do not hedge with "P2 or P3." - Justify in two sentences max. Reference what the user said, not what you assume. - If the ticket would change priority depending on the answer to a clarifying question, name which question and how the answer would shift it. Ticket: [paste the ticket from step 1] Likely causes: [paste the likely causes from step 3]
Draft the response to the user
Now draft what you would actually send the user. AI tends to write help desk responses that sound corporate (“Thank you for reaching out. Your concern is important to us.”). That is exactly what you do not want. A good response sounds like a human, gives the user a clear next step, and asks the questions you actually need answered.
You are a help desk technician responding to a user. I will give you the ticket and the clarifying questions you need answered. Draft a short, friendly response.
Rules:
- Under 100 words.
- No filler ("Thank you for reaching out." "We apologize for the inconvenience.").
- Open with one sentence acknowledging what is happening for them, in their words.
- Ask the 2-3 most important clarifying questions in plain English. Number them so they answer in order.
- Tell them what you will do once they reply, in one sentence.
- Sign off with your first name only.
- No emoji.
Ticket:
[paste the ticket from step 1]
Clarifying questions to include:
[paste the top 2-3 from step 3] Compare AI's first draft to your edit
AI's draft
Look at what the AI wrote first.
Did it sneak in any phrases you would never say out loud? “We apologize for the inconvenience.” “Your concern is important.” Cross those out.
Your edit
Read your edit out loud.
If a friend received this from a coworker, would it sound natural? If yes, you are done. If not, edit one more pass.
Self-check: would you send this?
Check each one you can honestly say yes to. Saved to your browser.
If you got five of six, you have a response that would land well. Run this loop on three more tickets this week. Triage gets faster the more times you do it.
What to watch for
- AI assumes the user is technical. If the AI’s clarifying questions include “what is your IP” or “check your DNS,” strip the jargon. Real users do not know.
- AI escalates everything to P1. Push back. Most help desk tickets are P3. If the AI insists on P1 without a deadline or revenue impact in the ticket, override it.
- AI invents context. If the AI says “since you mentioned the new VPN,” but the user said nothing about a VPN, the AI is making things up. Read the original ticket again before sending the response.
- Never paste a real user’s name, email, employee ID, or device serial into a public AI tool. Strip those out and replace with [user] or [email] before pasting the ticket.