How to teach your users/customers to send better error descriptions

Posted by ckeller on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by ckeller
Published on 2011-05-04T13:50:10Z Indexed on 2011/11/23 10:09 UTC
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I often have to deal with customers or users which are reporting errors in applications. Most of the time their content is something useless as

  • ERROR!!!
  • x does not work

without much more information.

For resolving the issue I have to request every single detail of them, which often is more time consuming than fixing the issue itself. Other send information in formats which are not ideal, like screenshots (of data records, not of errors) although they could send a link (we have access to the systems) and so on.

How do you tell your users/customers to describe the problems with more details so that the whole process could be easier for both sides?

edit

This question is more about the social skills, than how to achieve programmatic collection of logs and error information. I'm aware of the fact that this should be part of good software design.

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