The first step of Help Desk support is to reveal the origin of the issue. To find that out you should reveal the symptoms of the issue. Try to get as more exact info from the customer when you get an issue like "My PC/Your software does not work". You may start with next basic questions:

1. Which exact error message do you get?

It is the easiest, but 60% exact question that can be a key to jump to conclusions of what can be wrong. An experienced supporter could solve the issue once he/she receive an error message. Sometimes the message itself is not helpful, supporter needs to know where, when and what was performed for the error message to appear. Thus, ask a remote user to send you a screenshot of the problem and a full text message of the error.

2. Where does the error occur?

By determining this you can identify what customer was doing, what might have gone wrong, which process or part of the software could cause the problem.

3. How long do you face with an issue?

The software can't work for a certain time period and then just go wrong. Try to determine if the error occurred always or it has just started? If it stopped working recently - something has been done that prevent software to work.

4. Which changes have you recently performed?

Be ready that your customer will tell you that nothing was done and the program had stopped working itself. People are very reluctant to admit it could be themselves who caused the problem. If everything was OK, but then stopped working something should always had been done. Users may reinstall OS and then loose regkey, install a conflict software, change hardware, etc. Customers might not be aware of changes or might not realize the significance of some apparently unrelated change.

5. Is it a local issue?

Ask customer if the issue occurs on one specific PC or the program does not work anywhere. If it works OK on any other machine - then the fault obviously lies with the configuration of this individual's machine. In case any machine where customer tries to run the software fails and the same issue occurs - it might be either the problem of configuration of all customer's machines or bug is really in your software .

6. Incompatibility issues.

Antiviruses and other blocking software can have an automatic update customer may not be aware about. Ask your remote user to uninstall temporary that blocking software to test the program. It could have been working before, but recent database update of blocking software can contain some incompatibility issues. Be very persuasive that it is just a temporary uninstall as most of users do not like to have their PCs unprotected.