Early in my helpdesk career, I got a ticket that just said: "internet is broken."

No device, no error, no context. My first instinct was to ask for more details and wait. Bad move — that's how tickets sit for hours while the user gets more frustrated.

What actually works: assume you'll get almost nothing useful in the first message, and build a habit of asking 2-3 sharp, specific questions upfront. "Is it just this device or all devices on the network? Any error message on screen? Did anything change recently — new router, VPN, updates?"

That one ticket ended up being a DNS misconfig on a single machine. Took 10 minutes to fix once I had the right info. Could've taken 10 minutes total instead of an hour of back-and-forth if I'd asked better questions from message one.

The technical skills matter, but this job is 50% translation — turning "it's broken" into something you can actually act on. That's the part nobody teaches you in a certification course.

If you're starting out in IT support: get good at asking questions before you get good at fixing things. The fixing part is usually the easy half.