A common challenge for support personnel is explaining very complicated information in a way that is understandable for the user. Part of being helpful depends on the support engineer's ability to translate this complex information into a form that is less daunting. A true test of how well you understand a given subject is to try to explain it to someone with little or no knowledge of that subject. There are a few methods that can help you accomplish this, but the main thing to keep working on to be more helpful in providing support is your knowledge of the products and services you provide support for.
This section offers a few tools you can use, but they will only be effective if your knowledge is up to standards. If you are confident you truly understand your products and services you can prepare yourself to apply these tools effectively.
We learn mostly by a process of relating. It is much easier to expand links in the brain that are already available to you. The same is true for your user. If you are able to find closely related subjects that the user already knows and can expand on that you will find it easier to create an "aha" moment. For instance, when you were studying math in school you learned a few basic concepts first, such as adding and substracting. Only after you mastered these basic concepts were you able to move on to more complex mathematical operations such as multiplying and fractions. Your brain was creating new links and this started giving meaning to numbers for you.
To tap into knowledge that already exists with your customer you have to go through the same process. Start small and move to more complicated levels of understanding slowly. Find out what the user understands already and which gaps you need to fill. Then use references to similar subjects to make it easier for their brain to put in the new links regarding the subject you are explaining. For instance, explaining a network connection from the users computer to the internet may be easier if you start by talking about a highway with road signs and lanes: First you travel on the highway until you reach the nearest exit to your destination, then you travel smaller roads to reach the final address using your map. Computer data packets travel the internet in much the same way. A data packet is like a car, an ip-address is like a postal code, and the map and exit signs are dynamically created by routing protocols. (You can easily add to this: a city is like an isp, a streetname and number are like a DNS name, and so on.)
Linking complex information to similar examples makes information tangible and saves the user from drawing their own mental image to represent how the parts combine into a complex set of information. Sometimes this is less precise than reality, but that does not matter, because the precision is not always comprehensible for the user and usually is not relevant enough in relation to the problem or question.
Another method of transforming raw information into something more tangible is to explain the theory with a good example. Hoard your examples, because it is very hard to find good examples. A good example is relevant to the question, close to the situation of the user, easy to follow, and clearly formulated. The more of the aspects you manage to hit, the better the example. An example of how a computer sets up communication with a webserver and retrieves a page is:
When you request a webpage using your browser, your computer will use a few techniques to retrieve the webpage and display it in your browser. First the computer uses a DNS lookup, then the computer sends an http request to the webserver, finally the computer processes the response. For example: You type 'www.google.com' in the address bar of your browser, your browser instructs the operating system to send an http request to www.google.com and your operating system translates the address, www.google.com, into an ip-address (the webserver's address), 195.123.11.1, which is like a postal code. This means that if your DNS lookups fail, the operating system will not be able to figure out where to send the request and your browser will display page not found. To check the DNS settings for your internet connection ....
Story telling is the method of sharing information since before the written word. As such, human beings are very good at remembering stories and getting information from them. If a user does not have enough context to understand what you are trying to explain; a story can help a user relate and provide the required context with the message. A story doesn't just contain the message itself, but also guides a user how to get to the point where the message makes sense. Story telling is hard and requires a lot of practice and experience, but it is one of the most compelling and effective ways to share information even when the user does not have the prerequisite knowledge to understand the complex message of the bat.