Printer Support

There is a printer on the second floor of Tollgate Foods that has its own folklore. It jams when the finance team prints statements, which it does on the last day of the month. That is when the finance team most needs it not to jam. It has been replaced twice, and the replacement jams too, which has led to a theory about the floor. The desk has stopped laughing about it, partly because the finance team stopped laughing first. The other reason is what somebody found when they finally counted. The second-floor printer and its two cousins were a tenth of the queue, every month, forever.

This series is about taking the joke seriously. It covers why printers generate so many tickets, which turns out to be a design fact rather than a curse. It covers the print triage flow that tells printer from queue from user in five steps. It covers drivers, queues and defaults done once, centrally, so the same fix stops being done forty times. Then come jams, consumables and the physical stuff, including the laminated card that answers the ticket before it is raised. It covers standardising the printer fleet, which is where the numbers really move. And it covers measuring and reducing printer tickets per device, so the folklore becomes a scorecard and the second-floor printer becomes a decision.

Articles in This Series

• Why Printers Generate So Many Help Desk Tickets
  A shared device with moving parts and a driver used by people in a hurry; the categories; owning the joke while counting honestly; and the printer ticket census.
• The Print Triage Flow: Printer, Queue or User?
  A test page from the device, from another user, from the server; the stuck job; the driver; the network. Covers the five-step order that finds the layer in minutes, and the triage card.
• Printer Drivers, Queues and Defaults Done Once
  One driver per model, central queues instead of direct connections, sensible defaults, queue names people can find, mapping by location, and the queue standard.
• Paper Jams, Consumables and the Physical Stuff
  The jam that keeps recurring, consumables stock and who changes toner, the laminated card on the printer, the self-help article everyone can see, and the on-printer card.
• Standardising the Printer Fleet to Cut Tickets
  Fewer models and locations, a managed-print arrangement described generically, a printer-to-staff ratio as a worked example, retiring desk printers, and the fleet standard.
• Measuring and Reducing Printer Tickets Per Device
  Tickets per device per month, the lemon device, the location hotspot, the quarterly review, declaring a device dead, and the printer scorecard.

Explore More Topics

This series is part of the QuerySolv helpdesk topic library. It covers the foundations, processes, communication, knowledge, tooling, metrics, classic ticket domains, people and strategy behind a support desk that works. The library pairs well with the software we build: QuerySolv. It is a self-hosted help desk that runs as one Windows service on your own network. It is licensed once per installation, not per agent per month.